The Penultimate Act of Modern Liberalism
Those have a more synthetic frame of reasoning often view history as a series of repeating cycles. This has always been in contrast to the more analytical mindfame, which views history as a linear path toward what some believe are inevitable and supremly desireable outcomes, would-be predetermined goalposts of human development. Moderns tend to favor the latter; ancient cultures prefer the former. A large part of this may be because moderns favor the synthetic and artificial, while ancient cultures had no choice but to live in harmony with, and be subject to the whims of, the rhythms of nature.
The various monotheisms of the world, along with their attendant eschatologies, transformed this ancient, cyclical point of view by in effect creating a via media. The natural order had its cycles and its patterns, and these were readily ascertained to the human mind. At the same time, the clock moves forward, and not backward. One winter is not exactly as cold as another. As Newman put it, May will triumph over the November, but November will always exact its revenge upon the May. Yet the cosmos continued on toward the consummation of all things. The union of the concepts of progressive time and cyclical pattern can be compared to the same philosophical synthesis achieved by Aristotle and his philosophical progeny. The Pre-Socratics famously believed, fundamentally, that reality was either all change or all static. Aristotle combined these perspectives in regard to discrete natures within reality, a union of the always-changing matter, and the immaterial, eternal form. This philosophy, hylemorphism, is still very much in force among theologians heavily influenced by the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and others.
So what do you get when you unite cyclical history with progressive history? Oblique history. This is the idea that while history marches on, there are repeated patterns to be seen, but there is also something which goes forward, and not backward. Oblique history is like an eagle which spirals upward on a thermal column, higher and higher, yet moves in a circle at the same time. It is like a corkscrew line, which goes in one direction, yet spins in its course.
One thing we can take away from the current moment of history is how postmoderns do something incredibly strange. Rather than bring together change and stability, time and eternity, the move toward artifice, which began with the Industrial Revolution, has now moved toward the triumph of the synthetic. This is the synthetic, not in the sense of seeing pattern or bringing together seemingly opposed points of data. Instead, it is synthetic in the sense of artificial, of a basic unreality. Critical History, which is the discipline of deriving the truth of events via a judicious examination of data, has been largely abandoned in favor of a return to grand narrative. Yet in this case it is even worse, because grand narratives often contain a substrata of the real. This is virtual reality, the creation of the future with only the barest patina of legitimacy. As more and more people live in the virtual and abstract world, rather than the grounded and historical one, this tendency will accelerate.
Leftists often compare the present time to 1930s Germany, trying to depict both domestic and foreign affairs as being part of what is, in essence, a grand liberal foundation myth: the 20th-century struggle and triumph other authoritarianism and fascism. This mentality was further reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the silly notion of the “End of History” promoted by Fukuyama. So much of Western History, let alone political practice, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been predicated on the quasi-inevitability of their continued western hegemony. To borrow an aphorism again from Newman, if to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant, then to be literate in history is to cease to be casually leftist. It also reinforces for us the fundamental unity of the human story, across cultures and societies.
The inability of postmoderns to engage in analogical thinking is one of the primary mental handicaps of the current age. Many secularists accuse religious people of black-and-white thinking, but even the most demented and sadistic fictional High Inquisitor had more mental capacity for nuance than the thought-crime police of today. Last weekend, American viewers were treated to the spectacle which was the news progam 60 Minutes covering the dawn raids of German Police against its own citizens, whose only crime was posting or reposting certain memes at odds with the dominant political philosophy or the words of particular politicians.
For “defending our democracy”, it is an acute irony to see our societies reintroduce aristocratic crimes of Lèse-majesté, where the august personages of politicians in a supposedly equal society cannot endure offense or contradiction. As JD Vance correctly observed at the Munich Security Conference, this movement, which has been evolving for years, is completely illiberal, completely contrary to Christian or Enlightenment concepts of human rights. While the Judeo-Christian tradition does not espouse the concept that any one has the absolute legal right to free speech, it does defend the moral right to free speech. In the case of Christianity, born in conflict with Roman Society, and whose Savior is an unjustly-executed ‘criminal’, the sacred right to rebuke the mighty of this world is in its DNA.
This weekend may mark another small collapse of the wall of Western Liberalism, with the German Federal Elections. Virtually all Western governments have established a cordon sanitaire around any political movement to the right of Angela Merkel. One of the greatest political psyops of modern history has been to deceive the populace into believing that anything to the right of Clintonian Liberalism is somehow a return to the politics of Genghis Khan.
The political commentariat has been talking incessantly since 2016 that liberalism as we know it is in its terminal phase, and that certainly appears to be true now more than ever. It is encouraging to see practicing, intelligent Catholics like JD Vance take the helm in giving intellectual heft to the populist Trumpian impulse. Trump’s strength was in reforming the old working class coalitions, but Vance’s achievement may lie in recruiting white collar society into a more cohesive political union. History does move, and it does rhyme, and so it is important to see where the current time is both different from and similar to former ones.
As all this is unfolding, the old nerve center of the Western World is also bracing for a moment of transition; Pope Francis lies in a hospital bed, perhaps gravely ill. Francis may prove to be a transitional historical figure in world affairs, as he assumed the Throne of Peter in 2013, when the post-Cold War order was still in full force. Now, in 2025, he presides over the Church as this order continues to unwind. Pope Benedict prophecied this historical process in his 2005 homily on the “Dictatorship of Relativism”, that the assault on the very concept of truth was antecedent to the rise of oppression.
Pope Francis has not done a very good job in voicing a coherent Christian vision of politics, uniting theory with practice. Returning to JD Vance, who spoke of the ordo amoris, a concept enshrined in Catholic Social Teaching, Francis seemed in his letter to the American Bishops to have very little knowledge of it. It is true that Scripture is clear that we ought to have compassion toward the refugee and the stranger. Yet Scripture also bears witness, as an historical record, to the countless disorders which emerge when the ‘refugee’ is not in fact a visiting guest, but a harbinger of public breakdown.
This present time, as the Papacy of Francis approaches its twilight, may well prove to be the penultimate act of the liberal era. It too has been old, stumbling around from crisis to crisis. Now it lies on its deathbed. Francis, much like the contemporary western governments, has been attempting to secure the liberal consensus through the explicit elevation of like-minded Cardinals. Yet the shift within the body politic of the Church continues to change, to shift more south, more east, and more conservative. It will be a spectacle to see if the Cardinals in the next conclave will create their own cordon sanitaire, ropping off candidates which are considered too conservative to govern the Universal Church.
The Church, like the world, moves through history. She too has her patterns and seasons. But above all, the question we should ask is whether we will decide to move with the times, as a dead fish in the stream, or whether we will continue to govern out of our principles and moral convictions.
