The Other “Nones”

 From Daniel McCarthy at Modern Age:

In the twentieth century, great ideologies fought to dominate the world. They were the legacies of the French Revolution and the philosophy of Karl Marx: the former showed that the ancient order of Europe was fragile and would shatter from violent upheaval; the latter prophesied an inevitable post-revolutionary future of freedom and equality. Fascism and even liberalism came to style themselves after those original nineteenth-century revolutionary impulses. As the Soviet empire rotted away, liberals hailed their own ideology as the end of History. Liberalism had proved to be the truly rational ideology, they believed, and it must sooner or later prevail everywhere. Rogue states and terrorists could only delay this revolution, not prevent it.

The proof was the absence of any alternative: if communism and fascism had failed, then another ideology must have succeeded. History without direction or end was inconceivable; some rational vision of human destiny must be correct. The only thing that could falsify the triumph of liberalism would be the rise of some compelling new comprehensive ideology that was able to win more converts. No such system turned up. There are still a handful of geriatric communist states, and fascism is supposed to recrudesce whenever liberal watchdogs let their guard down. Yet no fresh competitor in the struggle of global revolutionary ideals has come forward in the twenty-first century.

Liberalism was the last hope for progress as a political faith—a system that could rationally organize the world for human benefit by following the economic and moral laws of benign nature. But despite the absence of any equally systematic opponent, the great ideological edifice is crumbling. Instead of winning ever more converts, liberalism is losing adherents, and its institutions are in crisis. What faith in progress remains is ideologically splintered and personalized, consumed by identity politics rather than united by the conceits of scientific universalism. It’s as if a great religion has collapsed into an anarchy of cults. This is the end of History—not a goal attained but a capital letter rendered irrelevant. Entropy has dethroned progress.

The very capacity for organized faith, not just in religion but in progress too, is eroding in the twenty-first-century West. Nones may be postliberal as well as post-Christian. The ideologies that thrived for two centuries after the French Revolution did not succeed in replacing religion with a secular substitute; they were all along vulnerable to the same loss of faith that afflicted Christianity itself. And while Christianity endures despite weakening commitments in the West, progress as a faith has nowhere else to go in this world or any other. It aspired to be more universal than any church, but faith in progress is instead far more parochial. (Read more.)

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