I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be taken seriously at all, for what's best in its traditions if the way most Catholics have acted is the measure. The same can be said of the Calvinists, but as I argued in my previous post, we're all Calvinists now, even Catholics, and we need to understand how Calvinism shapes the way we experience the Real for better and worse.
I have often wondered why the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination didn't lead the Calvinists into a kind of Amish separatism. For the early Calvinists, most people are unregenerate and damned, so why should the elect not just move away and start something new that leaves the damned to the damned. Perhaps the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts came close to this kind of project. But the early Puritans saw themselves not as separatists, but as a vanguard, a light shining on a hill to be emulated by those left behind in England.
This is one of the main questions that Charles Taylor addresses in both A Secular Age and Sources of the Self. He is quite eloquent in describing how ambitious the Calvinists were not just for themselves but for transform all of European society. The English Civil War and the Thirty Years War are hard to understand without acknowledging this as a central Calvinist objective. They wanted to tear down the old thing in its entirety and to build something new. But If they truly believed that most humans were utterly, irredeemably depraved, how could the possibly believe that such a reform project could possibly succeed?
As Taylor points out, the Calvinist logic is that good people—the regenerate—do good things. Paul says to the regenerate in Corinthians 1: 15.58—"My dear brothers and sisters be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.”
Calvinists do good not because it is efficacious for their salvation, but out of an energy that flows from their having been regenerated. There is something genuinely noble about that. There's no quid pro quo, no need to do good to earn points that can buy you a place in paradise; instead, there's just the impulse to do good because that's what's called for, because It's what conscience dictates. But not only must they do good, they must order their lives and the lives of others in such a way as to restore creation from the chaos into which it has degenerated. So, this means that they must restore order in society and in the lives of the unregenerate, even though most living in society are damned.
For the Puritans, the disorder of the world is a stink in God’s nostrils, and so the regenerated have a responsibility to mitigate God’s discomfort and the insult this stinking, disordered, chaotic world presents as an offense to his dignity. Once the “law” awakens in the heart of the regenerate, he is tasked with imposing that law on a lawless world, and by force if necessary. There is an inside-out dynamic at work here. The order is discovered within, and then it is imposed without, both in getting one’s own life in order, but also in imposing order on the world. This is a central insight if one is to understand the the new kind of reform mentality that is born in the modern period. The Thirty Years War, rather than being seen as cruel, destructive holocaust, which it was, is seen rather as a violent cleansing of the old degenerate society to make way for the new regenerated one. We know now how naive such an idea is, but it's understandable that idealists of a certain temperament could believe this. Is it so different from the mentality of Robespierre, Lenin, Mao and those who were inspired by them?
The idea of radical, top-down, humanly engineered revolution is something that only becomes possible after Calvin. And so without Geneva in the 1550s, there would be no Paris in the 1790s. Rousseau was a Genevan, but he took the idea of Calvinist human depravity and flipped it on its head. The idea of starting something new, something in defiance of the old, is very much part of the Calvinist imaginary, and plays an important shaping influence on Rousseau's imagination of the possible. Without Rousseau, there is no French Revolution. The causes of the French Revolution are more complex, of course, but it was not possible without this very different, very modern idea of reform that originated in Calvinism. And it lays a foundation for the technocratic state ruled by the best and brightest who know what's best and seek to impose their will from their positions of power.
And at the same time Calvinism lays the foundation for the Baconian revolution in science. Both Puritanism and Baconism set themselves against tradition and see themselves as involved in creating something new, from scratch. Aristotle becomes the foe for each—an authority that stands in the way of seeing things more clearly as they are. So Aristotle and the whole premodern, medieval superstructure is ripped down, and the idea that traditions and customs have any value except to impede the transformation of the world into something pleasing to God for the Calvinists morphs easily into transforming the world into something pleasing for humans by the Baconians.
Modernity is the confluence of both Calvin and Bacon, but in such a way that the first, the idea of pleasing God, becomes gradually supplanted by the latter, which in turn becomes something understood as evolution-without-grace. Hobbesian and Macchiavellian realism emerge at this time. Both accept the world as defined by evolution-without-grace, a world ruled by greed, will to power, and promiscuous sexuality. To be a realist is to understand the world as if grace does not exist.
If the goal for the Calvinists was to restore God’s order, Baconian science provides a methodology that allows humans to come to a better understanding about what that order is. But there is a different spiritual impulse or energy at work in Baconism. It works hand in hand with Calvinism because it is impelled by a desire to understand the underlying order of God’s creation in order to make it useful and productive. This had become a key element in the Puritan ethic—to be productive in ways that benefit humans, but it can very easily morph into the Faustian by the less pious.
So Baconism is the Faustian side of Calvinism. Baconism is a movement driven more by evolution-without-grace than by what was the originary imputse within Calvinism, which was to do what conscience calls for. There is a similarity of motive—to improve the human condition by the establishment of a new order—but there is a fundamental difference in the nature of the orders that each seeks to realize. It’s easy for people of good will to be confused by such distinctions, but one leads eventually to a mechanomorphic, technocratic hellscape, and the other to the New Jerusalem. As I argued in my previous post, we're headed for the former if we don't find a way to restore a sense of the latter's possibility, and I see that effected only by something like a transcultural Axial awakening some time in the next century.
But the idealism of the Puritans goes wrong almost from the start in part because of its image of God that stresses His power and freedom. God is everything all powerful and utterly free and without obligation to anyone or anything beneath him in dignity of Being. So he owes humans nothing. But this is the God of the philosophers, not the God revealed in the Bible. This idea of God as arbitrary despot depicts him as a being closer in nature to Genghis Khan than the one who reveals himself in a still, small voice to Elijah or as the one who seeks to forgive and befriend us in the New Testament.
God might indeed be all powerful, but that aspect of his nature is not how he presents himself in the Gospels. But no matter how pious the original intent--to exalt God and to insist on a radical human humility vis a vis the power of God--the Calvinist idea of God, even if unintentionally, aligns with and supports the technocratic power project of Baconism.
And there is something toxically arrogant about someone who insists that he knows God’s will and insists that you submit to it. This is the flip side of Calvinist humility--an incredible arrogance that the regenerate Calvinist knows better in ways that the unregenerate cannot. And this leads in turn to the remarkable hubris necessary to reorganize a society top-down according to a template that they alone had access to.
This mentality is secularized in modern revolutionary ideologies, which are born of the same kind of we-know-better arrogance. But so is this mentality found in the kind of technocratic mentality that reigns in Silicon Valley. It shares in the arrogance that I call Aspen Institute Liberalism, the mentality of rich elites who think they know better because they are rich and are good at navigating in the world created by consumer capitalism. Trump, Brexit, and the "democratic" embrace of illiberalism everywhere is an understandable, if even more dangerously toxic, response to this liberal, Baconian arrogance. The problem we face at this moment lies in that there are no healthy alternatives to either.
This kind of technocratic top-downism claims to be progressive, but it's a progressivism that is shaped primarily by evolution-without-grace. It's a "liberal" mentality that seeks to be cutting edge in the development of the new, and as such is consonant with the Baconian project to use science and technology to make life better for human beings. But at a certain point the tail started wagging the dog, and as modern society lost any sense of a vital connection to a sense of a transcendent moral order, there has been no foothold for people to get traction to push back. Technological progress is not human progress unless it can become baptized in some way, which is to say subordinated to the logic of grace. Technological progress without grace, i.e., evolution without grace, is dehumanizing--slowly at first, but ultimately it leads to the complete extermination or enslavement of the human.
Whether consciously or unconsciously acknowledged, evolution-without-grace is the metaphysics, i.e, the dominant metaphysical imaginary, of the intelligentsia in North Atlantic societies. It is running amok in consumer capitalism and in the developments in machine learning and biotechnology. As I pointed out in my last post, while in the short run evolution-without-grace might need human beings, in the long run it doesn't.
Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the culmination of the Baconian project, a project that from my pov seems peculiarly impervious to grace. As a Christian, I must live in hope that grace will find a way, but its operation in the world right now is out of sight, and out of most people's minds.