In this month’s issue of Position Papers we carry reviews of books dealing with Wokeism, the Black Lives Matter movement and Postmodernist philosophy – three key players of today’s “culture wars”. But while Wokeism and BLM are the hegemons of the moment, we can be pretty sure that new ones are being confected right now, in some academic equivalent of a certain infamous laboratory in Wuhan – probably a prestigious Ivy League university in the USA – and that in a year or so that next fad will sweep through the West bringing its usual toll of havoc in its wake.
While it is important to be well-informed about what is going on in the world, especially in the world of culture and thought, it is at least equally important to be au fait with the intellectual roots of these movements and fads. And to my mind Bishop Robert Barron has a particular gift to identify these intellectual roots, and trace their development into the orthodoxies of the day. This month we carry an essay by Bishop Barron, “The Adventures of Classical Morality”, in which he points out how the seventeenth and eighteenth century founders of modernity (who gave us many valuable insights of course) established as canonical the faulty epistemology which would poison the well for so much of subsequent intellectual work: “The founders of modernity became suspicious of our capacity to know form (for things seem to be in constant flux) and finality (for it just wasn’t clear where the universe was going).” Perhaps unwittingly, their abandonment of the form and finality of things produced the modern individual who is essentially unmoored from any stable realities – forms (or in the last analysis truth itself). For Barron, “The self-asserting and self-expressing ego never really gets anywhere, never breaks out of its own clean, well-lighted space.” And so today’s Woke, BLM or LGBTQ+ dogmas are simply the current, passing self-assertions of this wandering, unmoored, self-expressing ego. Tomorrow it will be something else, and so on until finally that ego finds its rest in truth.