Alan Jacobs on Richard Wolin's book Heidegger in Ruins, a tangential ramble on the problem of "ideas have consequences" bromides

If Wagnerians expend a great deal of effort attempting to explain how Richard Wagner was antisemitic but only culturally and not racially so or, alternately, explaining away that part of Wagner's character as not intrinsic to the nature of his art (Scruton, and I'm just going to say he completely failed to convince me), then Martin Heidegger's family and cultural curators have, it turns out, pre-emptively taken the time to distance the philosopher from National Socialism, which is the topic of a book Alan Jacobs has just reviewed.

https://blog.ayjay.org/book-review-heidegger-in-ruins/

Jacobs mentions that Wolin throws in Habermas as an alternative to Heideggerian criticisms of technocratic society.  But this, my gut take (for what that may or may not be worth) reminds me of Cold War dualisms.  There are scholars out there who say that if you want to "really" combat the influence of Carl Schmidt you must go embrace Gyorgy Lukacs.  Are we supposed to "defeat" the ideas of a Hitlerian with an open Stalinist?  Is that really how some academics think this stuff through?  Apparently.  I don't share the late Roger Scruton's lifelong capacity to contemptuously dismiss someone like Habermas because he was New Left but I have doubts that we're obliged to take Habermas as "the" alternative to Heidegger because someone like Wolin says so.  

Because I've been reading (slowly!) through John Neville Figgis treatise on the divine right of kings and finished Churches in the Modern State at the start of 2023, I am increasingly skeptical about the "ideas have consequences" bromide that saturates Reformed apologetics and evangelical cultural polemic but which also shows up in the academic writing.  If you only went by what breezy contemporary left-ish or progressive journalists write these days about "evangelicalism" you'd never know (because they don't know) that an articulate defender of the pluralist and secular state was the obscure evangelical Anglo-Catholic priest John Neville Figgis.  Figgis was sufficiently obscure that Brill cranked out a monograph about him in late 2021 but he was famous enough that David Nicholls wrote an entire book about Figgis and the early 20th century British pluralists and their responses to what they regarded as the increasing power of a centralized state and how individualism was not going to be a bulwark against it.  

What I have been thinking about lately is that one of the problems with the "ideas have consequences" trope in evangelical and conservative writing (or left-wing writing) is there is a propensity to use that as a preface to talking about one solitary idea to which is imputed all the good or evil of "society" in actual or potential terms.  So take those postmillennialists who claim they are "optimillennialists" to the "pessimillennnialists" of anyone else who isn't a postmillennialist with a historicist or futurist angle.  Doug Wilson is a partial preterist postmillennialist and I frankly agree with the partial preterist approach to Revelation.  What I don't agree with is postmillennialism.  I consider it a botch of biblical interpretation and I consider the overall legacy of postmillennialism as manifest in, well, stuff like Manifest Destiny to be an engine of atrocity.  

But what I don't do is rip on postmillennialism by itself.  Why should I?  Roger Williams was a postmillennialist and he argued that state coercion of religious confession is morally wrong.  Jonathan Edwards' postmillennialism played a role in his stance that whites should be tolerant of Native Americans (though he could turn around and write a defense of chattel slavery of blacks but I'm trying to stay off rabbit trails).  My point is that postmillennialism cannot be treated as some stand-alone dogma unconnected to other dogmas.

I've been reading histories of exorcism in Catholic and Protestant cultures in the West and something both Francis Young and Brian Levack have pointed out was that the most ardent cessationists where the English and Dutch.  What is cessationism? The idea that miracles and healings and demon possession and all those things that could be regarded as "supernatural" displays of God's power were just for the apostolic period.  When that which is perfect comes the imperfect passes away and since Christians got the Bible the sign gifts ended.  Levack and Young have both pointed out that cessationism emerged as a Protestant polemic against Catholic exorcism and claims of miracles.  People who claimed to be demonized (no Catholic or Protestant theologians claimed "possession" as colloquially understood was how to talk about demonization for about the last two to four centuries) were probably mentally ill.  The Anglicans banned exorcism, functionally, from 1604 through the 19th century.  

During the sixteenth and seventeenth century English Puritans and others developed the doctrine of postmillennialism, a notion that there was at least one millennium in which Christians would reign with Christ and rule over the entire planet.  Crawford Gribben has a dense but helpful book on that topic that is literally called The Puritan Millennium. Of course those English postmillennialists thought they were the ones who were going to usher in the Fifth Monarchy and if you want to know what that means it's a Danielic reference--four beasts represent four kingdoms and a fifth is symbolized by a stone not cut with human hands that grows great and spans the world.  One of my fellow American friends speculated that that fifth kingdom was the United States of America.  I kinda ripped him a new one for that idea and was maybe a bit too harsh.  Well, Fifth Monarchist Brits, if you will, thought they were going to be that kingdom.  

So by themselves cessationism and postmillennialism are abstract. One of many reasons I'm skeptical about the Moscow, Idaho zeal for "theocratic libertarianism" and postmillennial fantasies of a new Christian magistrate is having read about the history of how postmillennialism evolved. It was not considered orthodox theology to regard the millennium in Revelation as a literal temporal-spatial empire.  Key Reformers regarded such talk as blatantly heretical and Catholicism rejected literal millennarian thought as both heretical and the refuge of revolutionaries.  Once postmillennialism became an accepted orthodoxy in Anglican and American settings it became a ground for Manifest Destiny style doctrines.  But this varied wildly depending on which other doctrines were brought to bear on conduct.  But this gets me to a second reason I am doubtful about the Moscow fantasy of a new postmillennialist cessationist "mere Christendom".  Look at the places where, according to Brian Levack and Francis Young in their histories of exorcism, cessationism was the proverbial and literal rule of law?  How pious is the United Kingdom?  Is London a hotbed of orthodox Christianity?  When textual criticism emerged in the 18th century and the documentary hypothesis emerged how well did those postmillennialist cessationist groups grapple with that?  Are Boston, London and Amsterdam bastions of Christian piety centuries after postmillennialism and cessationism became Reformed defaults?  

So when I read Reformed writers say "ideas have consequences" it can seem as though they have great big blinders on as to what that would tell us about the long term impact of the double whammy of postmillennialism with cessationism.  The legacy seems profoundly mixed because while Dutch and English Protestant arguments that "witches" and "demonized" people should get mental and physical healthcare was beneficial those groups also exported literally white supremacist dogmas across the world.  English Protestants formulated ideas like the libertarian theory of the press alongside notions of racial superiority. As imperialist as they were the British didn't bother to do anything in the Pacific Northwest because it was too far away and not worth the trouble to try to go full imperial.  So there were English and Scottish and Russian groups in the Puget Sound area and along the Olympic coast for centuries.  These exigencies shaped the region alongside a Native preference for inter-tribal and inter-racial marriages.  What one of my relatives told me is that a practical upshot of this is you can have Native Americans who don't "read" as Native American according to usual physiognomies of "American Indian" because of that set of traditions.  There have been white separatist settlers across the Pacific Northwest, sure, but many of us do not put stock in notions of racial purity and ideas that a "nation" should be defined in ethnic terms seems stupid.

But to read postmillennialist cheerleaders I'm supposed to think that postmillennialism is "the" way to go.  Neville Figgis in Churches in the Modern State insisted that no religious groups sought religious liberties for individuals at all.  In fact the Reformers were swift to argue for the most extreme forms of the divine right of kings as a counter to claims of Papal supremacy that they could muster.  Not all the Reformers, of course.  I read a sermon by Emil Brunner this morning about how the Swiss confederation took the idea of covenant seriously and that led to a flourishing of freedom without resorting to autocracy but Brunner warned his fellow Swiss that for all their sense of political restraint the Swiss still had the vices of self-righteousness and love of money that meant they were not necessarily better than anyone else in Europe.  Being the pastor he was Brunner argued that the Swiss were sinners who needed to be saved by Christ, too.  So when contemporary American Christian writers with a conservative streak claim that they're drawing on the Reformers to argue for a Christian magistrate etc, etc, the Reformed traditions are too varied for that.  The "ideas have consequences' btomide can be a hand-waving gimmick to preclude keeping subjects like political theologies from getting more complicated by history than polemicists want them to get.  

Postmillennialism as a completely isolated dogma is not necessarily the catalyst for a bunch of white supremacist colonial/imperial activity but the sticky wicket is that postmillennialism has never appeared as a stand-alone doctrine.  Postmillennialism and cessationism combined with a dogmatic biblicism as an anti-Catholic stance taken as a trio seems to have led places like New England, the UK and Netherlands to be what the Reformers might regard as bastions of super-apostasy if they were alive to see the cultural results.  For contemporary postmillennialist cessationist biblicist Christians to think that this time around in 2023 if the right Americans do it things won't turn out the way they have over the last four centuries seems delusional.  It's also why I don't think the vast world of people who don't hold that trio of views should worry too much about whether these groups will get anywhere in the long run.  Many of the ideas about racial supremacy, vindication by history, and an obligation to colonize the planet existed in British civic religion whether or not National Socialism emerged.  

My brother once was in a conversation where he read someone online lament the fate of Belgium in WWI.  My brother pointed out that it seems the "good guys' in World War I were the British and the French and nations that thought it was "barbaric" that Germany wanted to annex land from their white neighbors instead of lording it over people of color in Asia and Africa like all the "civilized" nations had done.  Another relative heard about this and laughed and said that sounded like something a Native American would joke about on the topic of World War I history.  It may be an element of Native American humor to be bleak (as David Treuer has put it) and also to have a particularly jaundiced view of the European legacies that are considered "good" across the two world wars. 

As some progressive historians and writers have pointed out over the last generation or so, National Socialists drew inspiration from the eugenics movement in the United States. Part of a historical reckoning with bad ideas obviously includes remembering that sometimes the bad ideas "they" put into practice came from "us" whether we're happy with it or not.  Postmillennialist reconstructionists in the here and now with cessationist preferences may want to take a long hard look at the places they consider to be most apostate and ask whether or not those were the places that, four centuries ago, staunchly embraced the dogmas that contemporary theocons think will prevail.  Did they?  The answer history seems to have given is that the places that had postmil cessationism seem to be farthest away from the kind of Christianity folks in Moscow want to see flourish.  Meanwhile, Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has flourished.  They have got their issues, too, but I don't want to wade into the bad ideas charismatics with political interests got from postmillennialists in this post. :)