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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In these stormy times, voices from all fronts call for change. But what kind of revolution brings true freedom to both society and the human soul? Cultural observer Os Guinness explores the nature of revolutionary faith, contrasting between secular revolutions such as the French Revolution and the faith-led revolution of ancient Israel. He argues that the story of Exodus is the highest, richest, and deepest vision for freedom in human history. It serves as the master story of human freedom and provides the greatest sustained critique of the abuse of power. His contrast between "Paris" and "Sinai" offers a framework for discerning between two kinds of revolution and their different views of human nature, equality, and liberty. Drawing on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Guinness develops Exodus as the Magna Carta of humanity, with a constructive vision of a morally responsible society of independent free people who are covenanted to each other and to justice, peace, stability, and the common good of the community. This is the model from the past that charts our path to the future. "There are two revolutionary faiths bidding to take the world forward," Guinness writes. "There is no choice facing America and the West that is more urgent and consequential than the choice between Sinai and Paris. Will the coming generation return to faith in God and to humility, or continue to trust in the all sufficiency of Enlightenment reason, punditry, and technocracy? Will its politics be led by principles or by power?" While Guinness cannot predict our ultimate fate, he warns that we must recognize the crisis of our time and debate the issues openly. As individuals and as a people, we must choose between the revolutions, between faith in God and faith in Reason alone, between freedom and despotism, and between life and death.
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DOM
And to Jenny,
My beloved, my friend, and my heart’s delight.
And with heartfelt gratitude to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks,
whose brilliant, creative, and fruitful wisdom is
a compass and a guiding light in the present chaos.
And to all who long and strive for a
brighter human future in our time.
Let my people go!
You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Should any of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls.
A good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.
Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore, no wonder, he hath enemies.
I doubt much, very much indeed, whether France is at all ripe for liberty on any standard. Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition too put moral chains upon their appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters.
I will insist that the Hebrews have contributed more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. . . . They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
The absolute monarchies have dishonored despotism; let us be careful that the democratic republics do not rehabilitate it.
Since the Exodus, freedom has spoken with a Hebrew accent.
What will one not give up for freedom?
The time is coming when we shall have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can do much to help it.
We are impressed by the towering buildings of New York City. Yet not the rock of Manhattan nor the steel of Pittsburgh but the law that came from Sinai is their ultimate foundation. The true foundation upon which our cities stand is a handful of spiritual ideas.
If we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.
The Western world has arrived at a decisive moment. Over the next few years, it will gamble the existence of the civilization that created it. I think that it is not aware of it. Time has eroded your notion of liberty. You have kept the word and devised a different notion. You have forgotten the meaning of liberty.
To defend a country you need an army. But to defend a free society you need schools. You need families and an educational system in which ideals are passed on from one generation to the next, and never lost, or despaired of, or obscured. There has never been a more profound understanding of freedom. It is not difficult, Moses was saying, to gain liberty, but to sustain it is the work of a hundred generations. Forget it and you lose it.
INTRODUCTION
UPSIDE DOWN OR RIGHT WAY UP?
“SON, WE’RE IN TROUBLE. Chiang Kai-shek has just abandoned the city. We are at the mercy of the Red Army.” My father’s words to me early in 1949 are indelibly printed on my mind. I was seven and a half years old, and we were living in Nanking (Nanjing), the capital of the Western-backed Kuomintang, or the Nationalist government of China. We had met the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, we had witnessed the hasty packing of the Western embassies, and we had felt the pressure of the noose slowly tightening around the city. Soon, the People’s Liberation Army, led by the ruthless Lin Biao, was to march in and take over the fearful population that the Japanese had so brutalized twelve years earlier in the horrendous rape of Nanking.
The Chinese civil war was over. The People’s Republic was victorious. History’s fifth great modern revolution had succeeded. Communism had taken over the world’s most populous country. Loudspeakers were set up. Trials began. Executions took place. Fear and terror reigned. Friends who knew us well could no longer acknowledge us for fear of their lives, and locals who only a week earlier had seemed so friendly were baying for our blood. “Death to the blue-eyed foreign devils!” would greet us if we ventured out of the house. The horror of Mao Zedong’s Chinese revolution, in which tens of millions of his fellow countrymen were to meet their end, was underway. My father was denounced and publicly accused of trumped-up charges, and many of my parents’ friends were executed, imprisoned, or persecuted. The violence of the reign of terror was terror enough, but as the communists knew, the real terror they held over the head of the city was the unspoken fear of who or what might be next.
Years later as a graduate student at Oxford, I came to know the eminent Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin at All Souls College. Curiously, he had witnessed the Russian Revolution at the very same age in 1917. He had been horrified by one memory above all as he was walking through Saint Petersburg, then Petrograd, with his governess—the spectacle of a police officer dragged off by a mob and lynched. It had left him with a horror of mobs and physical violence for the rest of his life.
When we compared the memories of two seven-year-old boys witnessing a part of the two great revolutions of the twentieth century three decades apart, 1917 and 1949, there was no disagreement at the high table at All Souls. We had both been marked for life by twentieth-century Marxism and certain conclusions were beyond question: First, the communist revolutions, with their totalitarian repression, were an evil rivaled in modern history only by Adolf Hitler’s national socialism (Stalin, Hitler, and Mao setting the bar for modern dictatorship); second, the two English-speaking revolutions, though different because the English failed and the American succeeded, were united in their distinctive views of ordered freedom, so they would always stand firm against the revolutionary totalitarianisms of the right and left, as they had done in World War II; and third, socialism was unthinkable in America anyway because Americanism and the American dream were powerful surrogate ideas that rendered the appeal of socialism redundant.
Little wonder that fifty years later I stand aghast as an admirer of America’s great experiment in freedom as I witness the unfolding of recent events in the United States. Meddlers are never welcome in a family quarrel, but there are times when silence is impossible. As I write, leading voices have called for a root-and-branch revolution of a different sort. Legitimate protests against racism have erupted into violence, looting, arson, and anarchy, and large swathes of American society appear to be unable or unwilling to condemn the violence and defend their own revolution—and many are deeply ashamed and opposed to their own revolution. The destructive anger, of course, is merely the activist expression of the radical ideas that have rampaged through American schools, colleges, universities, and wider intellectual circles over the last fifty years. If 2020 was “the year of the Black Swans,” it was a rerun of 1968, “the annus calamitous of the Sixties,” but now fermented for a full half-century.
The grapes of wrath have ripened again. The great American republic is as deeply divided today as at any moment since just before the Civil War. Yet this time no Abraham Lincoln has stepped forward to address the evils, appeal to the Declaration of Independence, defend the better angel of the American character, demonstrate the magnificence of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” in our time, and call for a “new birth of freedom.” Strikingly too, the deepest roots of the present division lie in the ideas and ideals of a revolution that is flatly opposed to the American Revolution. In one generation America has been bewitched by ideas and ideals that owe nothing to 1776 and the American Revolution, and everything to 1789 and the French Revolution. In short, partly through design and partly through drift, America appears to be abandoning the ideals of the American Revolution for ideas that are disastrous not only to America but to freedom and to the future of humanity.
THE MAGNA CARTA OF HUMANITY
This book is a response to America’s crisis by a firm and longtime admirer of the American experiment. Three major themes run through my argument. First, the American crisis is a crisis of freedom and must be understood as such. Following Augustine of Hippo’s notion that nations must be understood and assessed by what they love supremely rather than by such factors as the size of their population and the strength of their armies, there is no question that America’s supreme love is freedom. In particular, America’s freedom is a unique concept of ordered freedom that is the legacy of the Hebrew Scriptures and of the Hebrew covenant in particular. The present crisis of freedom therefore goes to the very heart of the American republic and all that the American experiment stands for. It is a crisis whose outcome will prove as decisive as that of the Civil War. It is also a global crisis in the sense that its outcome will be crucial for the prospects of freedom in the human future.
Second, the present crisis stems from the fact that over the last fifty years, major spheres of American society have shifted their loyalties and now support ideas that are closer to the French Revolution and its heirs rather than the American Revolution. The two revolutions share the same name, revolution, and the same century, the eighteenth, but they are decisively different at almost every point—their sources, their assumptions, their policies, their narratives, and their outcomes. These differences mean that the choice between the two revolutions will prove decisive for America and for freedom. What Lincoln proclaimed in June 1858, when nominated to run as a Republican candidate for the US Senate, is true all over again. He echoed Jesus of Nazareth and applied the point to his time, but it is true again in ours. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”1America cannot endure permanently half “1776” and half “1789.”
Third, the time has come for a new global thrust on behalf of freedom and justice for humanity. The inadequacies and failures of the last several centuries in politics have become plain, especially in terms of the hollowness of much traditional liberalism and the horror of much radical leftism. The best way forward for America and the world must be through rediscovery and a fresh examination of what I will call the Sinai Revolution. Historically, it was the Exodus Revolution, and not the French Revolution, that lay behind the genius of America’s ordered freedom or covenantal and constitutional freedom. A rediscovery of the foundational principles of the Exodus Revolution is therefore the once and future secret of true revolutionary faith and a sure path to freedom, justice, equality, and peace.
These ideals are not clichés, and they must once again become solid realities in the coming generations. But while many radical and revolutionary claimants promise them, the urgent need is to deliver them, and the surest way to do so lies in the precedent, the principles, and the practices of the Exodus Revolution. Rightly understood, there is no rival to the Exodus Revolution in its realistic and constructive understanding of freedom. Sinai, and not Paris, represents such a beacon of freedom that it should be recognized as nothing less than the Magna Carta of humanity.
To anyone not deafened by the incessant noise of the current politicking and culture warring, and not mesmerized by the triple screen gazing of mobile phones, computers, and televisions, we are clearly at a most extraordinary moment in world affairs—for the human future, for the global world, for Western civilization, and for its lead society, the great American republic. This book therefore addresses the current crisis as part of the great human quest for freedom. And it goes beyond analysis to argue there should be a bold rediscovery of the vision of freedom that once helped to shape the English-speaking revolutions and that could now stand as a beacon for the peoples of the whole world.
1776 VERSUS 1789
But let me slow down. As the world emerges from the global coronavirus pandemic, two of the deepest questions raised are, Do Americans realize the contours of the world of the future that has been exposed? And will America now walk more humbly? Neither history nor human existence must ever be taken for granted. The passing of the angel of death devastated many of modernity’s lesser gifts, such as comfort and convenience, but it also rocked the central citadel of the idol of mastery, control, and self-reliance. For all our reason, science, technology, management, and punditry, human existence is never fully under human control. What history has always taught in terms of time, globalization now teaches in terms of space. Self-congratulation should always be advised to take a longer view and a wider perspective. Unthinking claims to exceptionalism shrink to a more modest size for anyone who knows history and the wider world. Each of us has only a finite life, and every superpower is only one nation like other nations.
What then makes America distinctive, and how strong and healthy is that distinctiveness today? Let me enter the discussion from the perspective of America’s past. The war that climaxed the American Revolution ended with the surrender of the British and Hessian forces at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. Perhaps apocryphally, tradition says that as the defeated troops marched out, the band was ordered to play a popular ballad from a century earlier, “The World Turned Upside Down.” (The 2015 Broadway musical Hamilton included a new song with this title as an homage.) The original seventeenth-century ballad came out of the heart of the teeming ferment of radical questioning, debate, dreaming, travel, freedom, and conflict that made up the astonishing two decades of the English Revolution, a revolution sparked by the demands for freedom. (“Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down,” Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers’ leader declared to the city of London.)2 Turning the world upside down was a leading theme of the English Revolution, and the English Revolution was the first of the five major revolutions that have shaped the modern era: the English, 1642; the American, 1776; the French, 1789; the Russian, 1917; and the Chinese, 1949.
The English Revolution witnessed the eruption of a colorful and rowdy cast of characters who burst onto the scene to disrupt the long-established status quo that, across all the different royal houses, had ruled England since time immemorial—the Agitators, the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the Quakers, the Shakers, the Seekers, the Masterless Men, and the Fifth Monarchy Men. Truly they and their republicanism turned the world upside down as they furiously set out to do—but only for the world to be turned right way up again, as their opponents and eventual conquerors saw the situation when Charles II returned and the monarchy was restored in 1660. At first sight the English Revolution was the failure of the five.3
But what is the right way up for a society? Who says so, and how are we to decide? Such questions raise issues that the global era would do well to debate today, for the unprecedented challenges of the global era raise the question as to which ultimate beliefs and which visions of political freedom can best lead the world forward. Those questions are not theoretical or academic. They lie at the heart of two immediate issues now troubling the American republic, but with huge longer-term implications for the West and the world at large.
First, what is the root of the current American crisis—the great polarization? As I said, the American republic is as deeply divided today as at any time since just before the Civil War, but why? Contrary to what many think, the division is not simply the result of growing inequities, the clash between the coastals (New York and California) and the heartlanders (in the Midwest and South), or between the populists (Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”) and the globalists (one-world advocates of borderless nations). The deepest division is between two mutually exclusive views of America: those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of 1776 and the American Revolution, and those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of 1789 and the French Revolution and its ideological heirs.
Such current movements as postmodernism, political correctness, tribal and identity politics, the sexual revolution, critical theory (or grievance studies), and socialism all come down from 1789 and have nothing to do with the ideas of 1776. These movements and their ideas are far more important than the professors, the politicians, and the protesters who express them today. Indeed, these ideas and ideologies subvert the very foundations of Western civilization, and they are designed to do so. They are the real dramatis personae without which the drama of America’s current crisis cannot be understood or resolved.
Second, why is there so far no American leader addressing the crisis from the vantage point of the American Revolution? That is the startling difference between the 1850s and today. There is currently no equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s leadership in the crisis. Lincoln not only addressed the evils of the hour, supremely slavery, but he did so by addressing them in the light of the Declaration of Independence and “the better angel” of the American experiment. For all today’s talk of “making America great again,” no American leader currently addresses what made America great in the first place. For a nation that is a republic by intention and by ideas, that deeper understanding is indispensable. No purely political, economic, managerial, or technocratic solution can compensate for the absence of foundational ideas.
To be sure, Americans still show a massive interest in the individual heroes of their founding generation—as evidenced by recent bestselling biographies of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others, as well as the Broadway musical Hamilton. But there is no equivalent interest in the character and workings of the American experiment itself, its distinctive understanding of freedom and the roots that made it what it is. And an entire generation has now been raised on the anti-American account of history promoted by writers such as Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project. The better books may still be read, but the founding leaders cannot be resurrected. If the great experiment in freedom is to continue, their ideas and the roots of their ideas must be recovered, and there must be leaders today who can set out those ideas and their relevance for our time.
IT WAS THE HEBREW REPUBLIC, STUPID!
Appreciation for history is scarce today, public debate is only rarely lit by foundational principles, and there is a further reason why the needed discussion fails to get off the ground—especially in the speech code, cancel culture of many American and European universities. Debate is often ended by prejudice and a fashionable consensus that chokes it off from the start. Modern freedom, toleration, and human rights, it is said, are all a result of the loosening of the restrictions and superstitions of religion, and therefore only any progressive narrative must remain adamantly secular. There is therefore a stifling consensus in many intellectual circles that trumpets its own canonical orthodoxy: freedom, toleration, and human rights owe everything to the blessings of the Continental Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and to the deep revulsion against the wars of religion in the seventeenth. In the great pursuit of freedom for the world of tomorrow, faith and freedom—Sinai and Paris—are said to be opponents, not allies. If America ever had any better angels, the critics add, they have been tarnished irreparably and can no longer be cited today. Full stop. End of discussion.
In fact, that view represents only one side of the debate we need to be having, and with any debate it takes two sides to make a genuine hearing. That first side is certainly powerful and fashionable. In Nature’s God, for example, Matthew Stewart rejects the mainstream understanding of the American Revolution and traces back its genealogy to “heretical origins” and the less-known “revolutionary dimensions of the American revolution.”4 “The real story of America’s philosophical origins,” he claims, “properly begins in ancient Greece, and its first protagonist is the most famous atheist in history [Epicurus].”5 Stewart highlights the ideas of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Ethan Allen of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, who set off the Boston Tea Party, and then shows how their ideas go back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus, the Roman poet Lucretius and the Dutch philosopher Spinoza. (“I too am an Epicurean,” Jefferson wrote to William Short in 1819.)6
According to this view, the real roots of American freedom, the meaning of terms such as nature’s God and self-evident truths and the very significance of America for the world’s liberal order today do not lie where they have long been thought to lie. They lie in the ideas of radical thinkers dismissed in their time as “deists,” “infidels,” and “atheists,” but whose thinking was well ahead of their time and has only now come into its own. Soon the time is coming, Stewart concludes, when those ideas will triumph completely. “Yet time changes all things,” and soon we will be able to see into the future “a nation that will have liberated itself from all forms of tyranny over the human mind. Call it the land of the free.”7
Such dreams of freedom are soothing and self-evident to many modern minds, which then raise the drawbridge and lower the portcullis against further debate. But in fact the other side deserves a hearing. Such arguments on the first side are skewed, and their main claim is flatly contradicted by a more accurate view of what followed the wars of religion. Freedom in the seventeenth century did not come from heretical origins, as claimed, but from principles out of the Hebrew Scriptures brought back into public discourse by Reformation thinkers and by public intellectuals such as John Locke and John Milton.
Debates over freedom flourished in Reformation countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. Even the so-called heretics based their appeals on biblical grounds. Thomas Hobbes, an atheist, cited the Bible more than any other book in Leviathan and far more than the classics. And whether or not Thomas Paine’s atheism ultimately came from Epicurus or Lucretius, many of his arguments and appeals in his bestselling Common Sense came directly from the Bible. His attacks on the notion of monarchy, which were surely decisive in the American Revolution, appeal directly to the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures.
The truth is that key ideas from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, rediscovered through the Reformation and disseminated through the invention of printing, were decisive in both the English and American Revolutions and especially in the rejection of monarchy and the rise of republicanism—and all this well before the French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. In the case of the English Revolution, these biblical and Reformation ideas ended up on the losing side and are now viewed as part of “the lost cause.” But in the case of the American Revolution they were central to what became the “winning cause.” Their stamp on the American way of freedom is unique and consequential, even if rejected today because of the flaws and inconsistencies in the way the American Revolution lived out its understanding of Sinai.
Thus, as historians Eric Nelson and Michael Walzer point out, the seventeenth century was the “Biblical century,” and the English revolution was “the war of the saints” because of the impact of the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura (Scripture alone). Its impetus was to point people back to the Hebrew Torah and above all to the revolutionary significance of the exodus, the “Hebrew Republic,” and to the thinking of the “Christian Hebraists.”8 “For roughly 100 years,” Nelson writes, “European Protestants made the Hebrew Bible the measure of their politics.”9 Needless to say, these biblical ideas contributed to freedom well before the Enlightenment, though they were then emphatically rejected by the Enlightenment, and also by the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions that were the later heirs of the French Enlightenment.
In sum, Western liberalism is rooted in ideas that are undeniably Jewish and Christian, and the weakness of much liberalism as it confronts radicalism today is simply the result of the denial and dismissal of these roots. Cut flowers are rather less hardy than well-rooted trees.
THE VOLCANIC EXPLOSION OF 1789
That last point is critical for understanding the modern crisis of freedom. The English and American Revolutions are decisively different from the French Revolution, and the future of freedom depends on appreciating the differences and choosing between them. The uncomfortable truth for Americans is that the United States may still be the world’s lead society, but the ideas of the American Revolution no longer inspire the world’s pursuit of freedom—even for many of America’s intelligentsia and the younger generation. The French Revolution towers over revolutionary thinking and action as “the great revolution” of the modern age. A spectacular Vesuvian explosion occurred in 1789. It lasted only ten years before Napoleon announced, “It is over” in December 1799, but its influence around the world is far from over. What flowed from it like red-hot lava was the notion of “the revolutionary” (created by 1789) and the “revolutionary faith” that has been powerful in the world ever since, which I will call “Paris” (even though it flourishes today in many places, but not in Paris).
The French Revolution has been described as “the central cause of the malformation of modern ideological thought.”10 Certainly, it ignited a host of revolutions and changes in its train. It became the precedent for other revolutions, it helped shape the rise of nationalism, it created the left versus right division in politics, and it raised the idea of the revolutionary as an activist whose ideology is as passionate as any religion and whose dream it is to transform humanity and change the world. Some of the later revolutions were successful, above all the Russian and the Chinese revolutions. Many were a failure—including the failed Paris revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The latter marked the end of the revolutionary era in Western Europe as well as the end of the Romantic movement. Victor Hugo immortalized the revolution of 1848 in his novel Les Misérables, later celebrated in its turn by the legendary musical of the same name.
But whether the later revolutions succeeded or failed, behind them all was 1789. When the French Revolution was over, the world had changed forever. “On a whole host of political, intellectual and structural planes,” historian David Andress wrote, “the French Revolution is the fount and origin of our modern world.”11 Hannah Arendt judged that “it was the French, and not the American Revolution that set the world on fire.”12 Literary critic George Steiner summarized the watershed significance even more extravagantly: “The French Revolution is the pivotal historical-social date after that of the foundation of Christianity. . . . Time itself was deemed to have begun a second time.”13 This spirit of Paris resonated throughout the world long after Paris itself had ceased to be a center of revolution. The Jewish poet Heinrich Heine captured this spirit perfectly in the nineteenth century. “Freedom is the new religion, the religion of our time. . . . But the French are the chosen people of the new religion, their language records the first gospels and dogmas. Paris is the New Jerusalem, the Rhine is the Jordan that separates the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.”14
The eminent historian and the US Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has told the story in his magisterial Fire in the Minds of Men. Revolutionary faith is “perhaps the faith of our time,” and “modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were the Christian or Muslims of an earlier era.”15 Revolution has always been compared to a spark and a flame. When anti-Napoleon conspirators in France were ridiculed for having no Archimedean lever and only a match, they replied, “With a match one has no need of a lever; one does not lift up the world, one burns it.”16 If traditional religion is to be described as the opium of the people, Billington remarks, “The new revolutionary faith might well be called the amphetamine of the intellectuals.”17
Almost as if prefiguring the script of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, France’s great revolution and its revolutionary faith (Paris) poured out in three major directions, each one taking up one of the three great tricolor ideals of 1789: liberté, fraternité, and egalité. American radicals have somehow missed the point, but liberty, which was the passion of the American Revolution, has always been the weakest of the ideals to be taken forward by 1789. Fraternity became the inspiration and the watchword for revolutionary nationalism in the nineteenth century, and equality (or the classless society) became the Holy Grail for the revolutionary socialism that also developed in the nineteenth century—though it became truly powerful in the form of communism only in the twentieth century.
Thus, the French, the Russian, and the Chinese revolutions all broke decisively with the precedent and principles of the English and American Revolutions, and the differences between the first two and the last three have proved, and will continue to prove, fateful for freedom. The Russian and Chinese revolutions represented the first successful establishment of secularist regimes in history: the Russian doing so in Europe and the Chinese in Asia. Along with Hitler’s Germany, the Russian and Chinese revolutions were also the first regimes to produce genuine totalitarianism. With the horrendous quartet of their total ideology, total mobilization, total surveillance, and total repression, these totalitarian regimes became the epitome of oppressive evil and the complete denial of liberty. Lenin’s triumph through the Bolsheviks was also, in Billington’s words, the “first major break in the basic unity of European civilization since Luther.”18
There is no surprise in the break between the American and the French Revolutions, for unlike the English and the American Revolutions that were rooted in the Bible, the French, the Russian, and the Chinese revolutions were rooted in the French Enlightenment (and less obviously in the world of Masonic Lodges and Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminism, as Billington demonstrates). These last three revolutions were overtly antibiblical, antireligious, and anti-Christian, and their overall record on freedom has been dismal. Far from ushering in the final form of freedom and representing a second coming of Epicurus, their claims to be the true and reliable source of human freedom have been left in tatters by the history of their repressive secularist regimes in the twentieth century and the slaughter of millions of their own citizens.
SAYS WHO?
The “Biblical century” was revolutionary, but with an entirely different vision of revolution than the French Revolution. In fact, the idea of turning the world upside down came directly from the Bible, where the prime revolutionary, and therefore the subversive of the status quo, is said to be God himself. As the Hebrew Scriptures see it, God is the true revolutionary. God creates order, but humans create disorder. So if right is to prevail and humans are to flourish, the disordered order must itself be overturned and God’s order reasserted. “You turn things upside down,” the prophet Isaiah charges his generation (Is 29:16 NIV). Turning the world upside down is therefore God’s way of turning the world the right way up.
For most of history, religion in a thousand forms may have been “the flowers on the chains,” as Karl Marx charged, but not the faith of the Bible. “For the first time, God is associated with change, transformation, revolution.”19 Faith in God is therefore protest against any and every status quo and all abuse of power. Revolution, though with a vision that is radically different from the vision of the political left, is central to the repair and restoration of the world. A new vision, a new way, a new family, and a new people are at work in the world. This revolution is constructive, not destructive. In turning the world the right way up, the revolution is restoration.
Both the Hebrew psalmist (Ps 146:9) and the prophet Isaiah declare, in the words of the King James Version, “The Lord maketh the earth . . . waste, and turneth it upside down” (Is 24:1). The Jewish and Christian faiths were the original revolutionary faiths long before the French Revolution. Both were called to be countercultural protest faiths, though the Christian church too often abandoned its biblical calling and became the chaplain to the status quo and even the cheerleader to a series of oppressive establishments. Today, following the shaking of world events, this positive and constructive vision of Jewish-Christian transformation is being rediscovered around the world.
The better-known precedent for the term revolution came later in the Bible when certain agitators in the Greek city of Thessalonica stirred up a riot against the early Christian mission of Paul of Tarsus with the famous words: “These that have turned the world upside down are come here also” (Acts 17:6). Beginning with its powerful and distinctive way of peacemaking, which was the antidote to the false peace of Pax Romana, the early Christian movement was regarded as subversive and countercultural. Later still in the first century, the Romans attacked the Jews themselves for attempting to turn the world upside down. When the historian Tacitus explained Judaism to his fellow Romans as he told the story of the Jewish wars under Vespasian and Titus, he commented: “Moses introduced a new cult, which was the opposite of all other religions. All that we held sacred they held profane, and they allowed practices which we abominate.”20
Plainly, “turning the world upside down” is a relative notion. It all depends on who says so, why, and what they mean by it. The mere claim to be revolutionary is not enough in a day when the idea is trivialized in common speech and co-opted by advertising and a thousand mini claimants. The question is, which revolution are we talking about, and where does it lead? To Paul’s opponents the accusation was a highly dangerous charge of sedition, serious enough to cause a riot and threaten his life, and the ultimate crime in the Roman Empire. Consider the fate of Spartacus and his six thousand followers who were strung up on crosses along the Appian Way. Later, the emperor Julian again leveled the charge against the Christians as he tried to restore the world by turning it the right way up as he saw it from the vantage point of paganism (“For through the folly of the Galileans almost everything has been overturned”).21
But of course, Paul of Tarsus, his Christian converts, eventually Julian’s successors, and the Roman Empire at large saw things differently and he was eventually called “Julian the Apostate.” The charge against the Christians had turned into a compliment. They believed that the good news they proclaimed was truly revolutionary, and the only way to set the world right again. Centuries later Karl Marx in his Young Hegelian days spoke of finding Hegel standing on his head and turned him the right way up, though doubtless Hegel would have protested at the indignity of such treatment of a master by a disciple.
And so it goes. One person’s right way up is another person’s wrong way up. One person’s revolution is another person’s rebellion, just as one person’s fight for freedom is another’s terrorism, one person’s liberty is another’s license, and one person’s sanity is another’s madness. (Think of Ken Kesey’s countercultural novel and the film it spawned One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) For the Jewish people the exodus is the “master story of freedom,” whereas Friedrich Nietzsche argued in The Anti-Christ that exodus stood for the return of a “slave morality” that he attempted to overturn in its turn through his own “revaluation of all values.”22 Just so the Puritan vision that historians describe as the “lost cause” in England became the winning cause in New England and then in America as a whole. Or again, the years 1642, 1776, 1789, 1917, and 1948 were all years that heralded major revolutions in world history, but the differences between the aspirations and achievements of the first two, the English and the American, and the last three, the French, the Russian, and the Chinese, are still the stunning, sobering, and prime shapers of the modern world and the future. The central contest is still between Sinai and Paris.
Remembering relativity is an important reminder and especially so when it comes to freedom, for Sinai-style liberation is entirely different from the Paris-style liberation of the progressive left. This book is for all who care about freedom and all who dare to be on the wrong side of those considered the “right people,” for it challenges the fashionable views of who is right and what is wrong. I am arguing here for what many supporters of Paris dismiss as the reactionary faith or, at best, as the other revolutionary faith. But rightly understood, Paris and the progressive left lead to repression, whereas Sinai is in fact the true and the original revolutionary faith, the best and most inspiring vision of freedom—the right way up for humanity. But with all the clichés, confusions, and conflicts surrounding contemporary freedom, and with all the relativity of different assumptions and perspectives of others offering their views, everything depends on what we mean by freedom and why. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noted in Elective Affinities, no one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. (What, for example, does it say of America as “the land of the free” that more Americans are bound by addictions and in recovery groups than any other people in the world?)
In the tumultuous chaos of the present moment we must each be clear about where we stand, what sort of freedom we are advocating, and why. The fact that a given situation has existed in a certain way for a long time does not mean that it is the right way up. Even the most powerful, prosperous, and seemingly permanent status quo needs to be justified and not simply asserted. Custom, consensus, popularity, and fashion may all be wrong, and the upside-down world of the outsider and the minority may well be the right way up in the end.
What matters too is that we are raising the question of freedom today when the world faces unprecedented tensions between three of the most powerful modern claimants to human allegiance: the Jewish and Christian faiths, progressive secularism, and Islam. And once again, the world finds itself torn between the two great bookends of human history, authoritarianism and anarchy. Authoritarianism is the world of order and stability without freedom (represented today by the governments of China, Russia, Turkey, Cuba, North Korea, and many other countries). It endangers humanity through what Billington calls the twin threats of “total war and totalitarian peace”—the latter being “a state of permanent war preparation without fighting.”23 Anarchy, on the other hand, is the world of freedom without order and stability (increasingly represented today by trends in the United States and much of the Western world). The present challenge is to establish genuine personal freedom and substantially free societies in a generation that pays lip service to freedom while all the time it is pulled toward one or other of the extremes—which, like all extremes, such as national socialism and communism, grow to resemble and reinforce each other at the point of their extremism.
THE QUEST FOR ORDERED FREEDOM
Why is the present moment so significant? The crisis for the West and the wider world lies in the fact that humanity now faces a simple but urgent question that must be answered in the coming generation: Is it still possible in the advanced modern world to build societies with both freedom and order at the same time? To build and sustain communities and nations that demonstrate the highest values of human dignity, freedom, justice, equality, compassion, peace, and stability? Can we solve the conundrum on which the French Revolution was impaled: guaranteeing both freedom for all and power for the people—without producing chaos and thus prompting the control of dictatorship? Or is that goal naive, a quixotic attempt to square the circle, and are such goals utopian under the conditions of advanced modernity? And do we have to settle, instead, for subservience to the proliferating rules and regulations of different political and managerial elites (aka Olympian oligarchies) whose expertise has trained them to know what they believe is right and good for the rest of us—if only we were as wise and good as they are?
This book takes these questions seriously. That is why the present moment is ripe with potential for a better way forward for humanity—if only there is leadership rather than passivity, reason rather than rage, hope rather than despair, and commitment to hard thinking and hard work rather than reliance on quick fixes and easy solutions. But of course there is no question about the diversity, relativity, and conflicts of today’s perspectives, and it would be easy to predict the almost certain dismissals that any vision would spark from those who hold a different vision. The task, then, requires cheerful humility as well as clarity about what lies behind this attempt or any attempt. As humans we all stand and speak from somewhere—it is quite impossible to speak from either nowhere or everywhere. So whether we have to defend our positions publicly or not, we all need to make sure that we have answered two initial questions—at least to our own satisfaction.
First, we must be clear what we believe is real. And second, we must be equally clear about what we believe is the right side up and why. The competition and clash of proposals in today’s world demand no less. This book itself is an answer to the second question. It sets out what I passionately believe should be the right side up for human societies, and it depends crucially on what I believe is real and is therefore an answer to the first question. For many people the issue of reality is irrelevant if not frivolous. Life is for living, and that is the end of the matter. Anything else is mere theory, and therefore only for the philosopher if not for the birds.
The question of reality has become important again because the Hindu and Buddhist view that the world is an illusion, maya, has been given fresh credibility in our time. Popular films such as The Matrix have raised the question once more, and speculations from the world of artificial intelligence have seconded the idea that what we think is reality is in fact only someone else’s simulation we find ourselves living in. In the words of the ancient Chinese sage, “If when I am asleep, I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly, how do I know that when I am awake, I am not a butterfly dreaming I am a man?”
For reasons that will become clear as we proceed, I do not hold the view that reality is an illusion. As quantum theory shows, the reality in which we live our daily lives may not be as simple and straightforward as it appears, and according to many ultimate beliefs our daily reality may not even be the ultimate reality. It is, however, a reality we may trust for all the purposes of a full, rich human life on earth—including the joys of human relationships, the important pursuits of business, art, science, and all the countless issues raised by what Socrates called “the examined life.”
FRATERNITÉ, EGALITÉ, BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO LIBERTÉ?
To all who survey the landscape of the last two centuries, it is clear that the French-style revolutionary faith and its fiery ideas have been major carriers of revolutionary action in recent centuries. Paris has ignited a myriad of revolutionary and would-be revolutionary leaders, writers, journals, debates, secret organizations, and conspiracies, with as many dead ends as successes. (Their descendants in America today are equally a potpourri of diverse and conflicting causes such as Planned Parenthood, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and countless others—all superfunded to the tune of billions by progressives such as George Soros.) But the overall pattern is clear. In all the ferment of passion and radicalism one dominant stream of the revolutionary faith has made the major impact in each century. In the nineteenth century the mainstream was not, as many might have guessed, revolutionary socialism or communism. It was revolutionary nationalism. It comprised those who hailed 1789’s ideal of fraternité (brotherhood) and used it to forge the revolutionary nationalism that launched successful independence nationalist movements in Italy and Greece. It also contributed to secular Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel and to what later morphed darkly into fascism and national socialism—Hitler: “This revolution of ours is the exact counterpart of the French Revolution.”24
Oddly, those who stressed fraternity had such a blind admiration for the “brotherhood of man” that they forgot the realism of the Bible’s reminder: the tensions between brothers (and between sisters) can be even more devastating than the oedipal tension between fathers and sons that was so loved by Sigmund Freud. Prince Metternich was so appalled by the French Revolution’s hypocrisy toward its own ideals that he remarked, “When I saw what people did in the name of fraternity, I resolved, if I had a brother, to call him cousin.”25
Needless to say, the second major stream, revolutionary socialism, was conceived and hatched in the nineteenth century, but it made its chief impact in the twentieth century when it burst through in the form of the two communist revolutions, in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949. The communists had no time for revolutionary nationalism or even for the French Revolution. The latter were incomplete revolutions, which had left too many stillborn dreams in their wake. Their own goal was the dream of an unfinished revolution, and they emphasized the ideal of egalité (equality) rather than fraternity. They used it to forge the beginnings of what they considered total revolution (exemplified by the intellectual labors of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels). For them the failed revolution of 1848 was the watershed between earlier “petty-bourgeois” forms of social change and their own brutally hard-nosed realism about the authoritarian leadership and the violence and terror that successful mass revolution would require.
This revolutionary socialism became the dominant revolutionary faith of the twentieth century, which blazed out in the form of communism and still survives. It disdained Western liberalism and even most of the earlier forms of revolution. It was adamant that its science-and-economics-savvy revolution had shed all traces of utopian sentimentalism and could now fulfill the disappointed hopes of 1789 and 1848. It was the hardline Marxism, established by Vladimir Lenin in Russia in 1917 and Mao Zedong in China in 1949.
The third and until recently less-obvious form of revolutionary faith is revolutionary liberationism, often known as neo-Marxism, Western Marxism, cultural Marxism, and even as user-friendly Marxism. It grew from the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It has led to the revolutionary ideology that has become prominent in Western Europe and parts of the United States after the 1960s. Today, in the twenty-first century, communism is still powerful in China, but it is this third revolutionary faith that is advancing throughout the West, and in America it is beginning to overturn the influence of the American Revolution. If the vision of a Grand March was the old revolutionary dream of the progress of freedom and brotherhood led by the workers of the world, it took Mao’s Long March in China in 1934 and Herbert Marcuse and Rudi Dutschke’s 1960s call for a “long march through the institutions” to bring the revolution of Western Marxism to its present position of influence in intellectual circles in America.
Just as the Great Awakening of the 1730s led to the American Revolution of 1776, so the radicals hope that their “great awokening” today will lead to the second American Revolution and fulfill the unrealized dreams of 1789. A cultural revolution is well underway and America’s “olds” (“old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas”) are as threatened as China’s were from Mao’s Red Guards in 1966.
The harsh light thrown on the record of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot makes it impossible to see that either revolutionary nationalism or revolutionary socialism can usher in freedom and justice. Their record has been disastrous for humanity and freedom. They both led to terror and unprecedented repression and slaughter, and they still do. The West now faces the challenge of the third revolutionary faith. In the form of postmodernism, political correctness, tribal politics, and the extremes of the sexual revolution, the advocates of cultural Marxism and critical theory are now posing serious threats not just to freedom and democracy but to earlier understandings of humanity and to Western civilization itself.
The progressive left has already transformed America in striking ways. It has created one-party faculties (in many elite universities), one-party newsrooms (in much of the mainstream press), one-party tech media companies (in firms such as Google and Facebook), and one-party states (in California). Before the statue-toppling iconoclasts took to America’s parks and squares, they had already been hard at work undermining the foundations of the republic in the classrooms. America’s equivalent of France’s “treason of the intellectuals” is far advanced, and the future of 1776 is called into question—not least because of the weakness of its defenders. The prospect of America sliding toward one-party national politics would sound the death knell of the American Republic.
It is time for the world to pause and make an accounting of all three streams of revolutionary faith and to assess the prospects for true freedom in contrast. There can be no doubt about the terrible cost of giving primacy to fraternity and equality as the guiding principles of freedom and justice. The price in human lives alone is more than one hundred million. Yet the challenge for the present generation is not simply to turn back to talk of liberty but to examine which vision of liberty best grounds the ordered liberty that brings with it justice, peace, stability, and the equality of dignity—and this time, liberty for all without exception. Is the way forward to be 1776 reformed? Or is it to be 1789, which to this point shows no capacity for reformation at all?
We already face a choice when it comes to considering liberty—between three different traditions of freedom in Western history. The first tradition has been called “the ancient liberties of the English,” though its roots go back to Anglo-Saxon sources in German forests. Its guiding star was the Magna Carta and the cluster of freedoms, such as freedom of expression, trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, and habeas corpus, which were all strengthened by the celebrated stand against King John of England at Runnymede in 1215. The second tradition comes from the influence of the “Hebrew Republic,” which represented the impact of the rediscovery of the book of Exodus through the Reformation, the affirmation of the exodus as the precedent and pattern of Western freedom, both for revolutionaries and slaves, and the decisive contribution of covenant to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thinking—especially to the rise of American constitutionalism and its distinctive view of ordered liberty. And the third tradition is the one that has come down from the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the “great Revolution,” and their heirs, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky, and Michel Foucault.
Plainly, the first two traditions of freedom overlap and complement each other, and the third is flatly opposed to them both at many points. Yet equally plainly, the third tradition now overshadows the other two in thinking circles across much of the world. It silences the first tradition as White privilege and shoulders aside the second as religious and therefore irrational and on the wrong side of history as secular progressives view it.
Behind these three traditions of freedom, of course, lies yet another series of choices with even greater consequences: the difference between the three major families of worldviews and ultimate beliefs in the world—the Eastern family of faiths, represented mainly by Hinduism, Buddhism, and various New Age movements; the Abrahamic family of faiths, represented by Judaism, the Christian faith, and Islam; and the secularist family of beliefs, represented by those with an atheistic, naturalistic, or materialist view of reality and life. The latter is the philosophy that goes back to ancients such as Epicurus and Lucretius as well as moderns such as Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Marx, and Freud. It therefore stands once again as the enduring rival to the Bible’s view of existence and life.
The choice between Sinai and Paris and their different views of freedom carries consequences that are monumental for the human future. As always, contrast is the mother of clarity. Let there then be a fair comparison and a wise assessment —assumption by assumption, principle by principle, and outcome by outcome. The significance of the choices between them is now magnified even further by the profound questions raised by the prospects of the rapidly approaching future. What is a human being? Is there a future for humanity as we have known ourselves up till now? What will the conquest of nature mean when the final battle is the conquest of human nature? Will humanity survive human beings? And as I said, in the midst of these titanic questions an enduring political question is unavoidable: Can we humans create a way of ordering our societies that fulfills the highest aspirations for human dignity, diversity, freedom, justice, compassion, peace, and stability—along with the highest responsibility for our fellow creatures and the earth? These are some of the questions that cry out to be addressed at this extraordinary moment in time.
THE MASTER STORY OF FREEDOM
This book argues for the Sinai Revolution—the highest, richest, and deepest vision of human freedom in history. After nearly two and a half centuries it is clear that Paris and the revolutionary faith that flowed from the great upheaval of 1789 has betrayed its promise again and again—in all three major forms. Shaped and bound by its assumptions, it cannot hope to do otherwise. It is flawed, it spells disaster for humanity, and it needs to be reexamined comprehensively and firmly rejected. Paris and 1789 in whatever form ends with revolutionaries who are wreckers and tyrants. The need today is for restorers and builders.
This book therefore calls for the repudiation of the revolutionary faith of 1789 and its contemporary offshoots, and for a major reconsideration of Sinai, the original revolutionary faith of the exodus and the Bible. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks argues in many ways through his many books, Exodus is both the master story of human freedom and the opening of history’s greatest and most sustained critique of the abuse of power. Those two claims are of monumental significance at this present moment in history, the second being especially crucial for countering the vaunted power-based theories of the progressive left. The book of Exodus and the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole are nothing less than the Magna Carta of humanity. Even more than the historic 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Sinai offers a vision of the deepest and most comprehensive foundations for human freedom ever to ring out over the landscape of humanity—and it also provides the only solid foundation without which even the great ideals for the “Universal Declaration” itself are built on sand.
In stating that claim and citing Rabbi Sacks, I must promptly acknowledge my debt. The vision of freedom outlined here owes everything to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and the wise and brilliant understanding of Rabbi Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain. (This book is therefore dedicated to him along with my beloved wife, to whom I owe an unpayable debt of a different kind, for her love and fierce loyalty over many years.) Doubtless, Rabbi Sacks would say that he is only standing on the shoulders of the giants of the long, unbroken tradition of his people. That is true, and what a tradition it is. But he too is a giant, and the freshness and profundity of his thinking about freedom deserve far wider recognition and discussion.
This book is intended to serve that end. Rabbi Sacks is well known, but this is to introduce him and his thinking about freedom to circles where he deserves to be even better known. If I have captured his wisdom in any way, the credit is entirely his. If I fail to do justice to his brilliance, the responsibility is mine. I no more agree with every word he has written than, doubtless, he would agree with mine. In all cases, readers would do well to go directly to his writings, beginning with his magnificent series on the first five books of the Bible: Covenant and Conversation. The depth and relevance of his teaching in our present moment would be impossible to overstate. From foundational human questions (How do we as human beings relate to each other at all and to God?) to equally foundational political questions (How do we as human beings negotiate life with each other when we are all so different and we all want our freedom?), his answers are profound and they carry profound consequences for life today.
