The End of the Age

    Two recent articles got me think about my major theme of the end of the Age of Enlightenment.  The first was “The Left Seeks to Return to Familiar Ground, Confident that 2016 Was an Anomaly” by Richard Fernandez, in which, as the title suggests, he observes that the left is trying to cope with the upheaval of 2016 and related shocks by interpreting them as anomalies, and their proper reaction being to try and get things back on their previous, proper course in accordance with their beloved “arc of history.”  Fernandez argues that these events may mark something fundamentally new, a lasting change rather than a blip.

    The other one which I can’t find now, since there are so many with a similar title, was one predicting that civil war in Europe was inevitable.  The theme was a ruling elite determined to increase Muslim immigration and a native citizenry opposing it.  The thing that struck me about this article was the author’s observation that the European elite showed no interest in modifying their policy in response to public discontent.  In much the way that Trump supporters here are dismissed ad deplorables, bitter clingers and now “dregs of society,” the response of European leadership to people upset with the ground-level impact of massive Muslim immigration is to dismiss them as neo-Nazi, “far-right,” and criminalize their dissent as “hate speech.”

    In other words, the problem here is that our politicians have ceased being politicians and become combatants.  Rather than listening to different groups pf people and try to work out compromise policies that keep the majority more or less satisfied like politicians do, they are picking one side and going for broke.  These, however, are not the Chinese rulers deciding to crush the people in Tiananmen Square, they don’t have that kind of power.  This is not likely to end well.

The Enlightenment

    The following is an over simplification, but you have to start somewhere in sorting things out.  One can divide history into large periods governed by a certain world-view, an over-arching paradigm.  We might call the period from 800 AD to 1250 AD the Middle Ages, the period from 1250 AD to 1500 the Renaissance, the period from 1500 to 1750 the Reformation, and the period from 1750 to now the Enlightenment.  Your history class probably called the period from 1750 to now “Modern History.”

    At its core, the Enlightenment exalted man and reason above God and revelation. The “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality” slogan of the French Revolution reflects three ideas of making man “God,” which is to say, the ultimate authority.  In Liberty, the individual is God.  In Fraternity, the nation or race or tribe is God.  In Equality, worldwide collective man is God.

    Fraternity gave rise to fascism which lost credibility after the second world war.  Equality gave rise to international communism which pretty much died with the fall of the Berlin wall, surviving mostly in university lounges.  Liberty is at the core of modern liberalism with its cult of the sovereign individual.  Today we see liberalism coming to some kind of end point with its fanatical pushing of feminism, homosexuality and transgender ideology, a terminal decent into madness.

    When you step back and look at this major rejection of the Law of God and Gospel of Jesus Christ by a civilization previously known as “Christendom” it is pretty spectacular.  The bloodshed, mayhem and death accompanying it has set records.  And although the Age of Enlightenment may be at its end as I believe, it’s not done yet.

​    All of this is to say that I don’t see the current Trump-Brexit-EU crisis as an anomaly.  I see it as the end of an age, and am at once moved to trepidation and hope.  Trepidation because these inflection points in history are often tumultuous with war and famine, hope because I see this as an opportunity to usher in a new Christian world order where the Law of God and Gospel of Jesus Christ are the foundation of our social order.