A culture of this kind is not culture at all in the traditional sense—that is to say it is not an order which integrated every side of human life in a living spiritual community.
Indeed it may become the enemy of human life itself and the victory of technocracy may mean the destruction of humanity since it is impossible to ignore the way in which the latest triumphs of applied science have been turned to destructive ends.
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The events of the last few years portend either the end of human history or a turning point in it. They have warned us in letters of fire that our civilizations has been tried in the balance and found wanting—that there is a an absolute limit to the progress that can be achieved by the perfectionment of scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values.
There are many, as for example H. G. Wells in his last days, who have drawn the extreme conclusion and believe that the process of disintegration that threatens the existence of civilization cannot be arrested or diverted.
If there were no alternative to the total secularization of culture, this pessimism would be justified.
But if, on the other hand, the movement of secularization represents only one aspect of human life—if mankind possesses other resources which have been temporarily neglected but which still remain available—it is possible to see the present situation as a temporary crisis due to the over-secularization in a particular direction, which will be corrected by a swing of the pendulum in the opposite directions. This movement of alternation has always been part of the normal development of culture, and the recent movement of secularization is unique only in its extent and in the immensity of the forces it has generated. But there is no reason to believe that it will not ultimately be succeeded by a movement in the other direction towards religious belief and spiritual integration, as has been the case with all the more limited movements towards secularization and the disintegration of the synthesis between religion and culture in the past.
Religion is still a living force in the world-today. No doubt it is difficult to estimate the hold religion possesses over men’s minds and lives, for it is not a force which can easily be measured by statistical methods.
There are authorities like Professor Latourette who assert that so far as Christianity is concerned, the last century and a half have seen its widest expansion and its largest effect upon the human race.
There are others who argue that this advance has been superficial and peripheral, and that religion has lost more by the secularization of culture than it has gained by internal organization and missionary activity. However this may be, there can be no question that, on the one hand, it survives and in certain respects flourishes, and on the other hand that it has lost the organic relations with culture which it possessed in the great religion-cultures of antiquity of the Middle Ages.
Thus we have a secularized scientific world culture which is a body without a soul; while on the hand religion maintains its separate existence as a spirit without a body.
This situation was tolerable as long as secular culture was dominated by the liberal humanist ideology which had an intelligible relation with the Western Christian tradition, but it becomes unendurable as soon as this connection is lost and the destructive implications of a completely secularized order have been made plain.
We are face with a spiritual conflict of the most acute kind, a sort of social schizophrenia which divides the soul of society between a non-moral will to power served by inhuman techniques and a religious faith and a moral idealism which have no power to influence human life. There must be a return to unity—a spiritual integration of culture—if mankind is to survive.
The whole history of culture shows that man has a natural tendency to seek a religious foundation for his social life and that when culture loses its spiritual basis it becomes unstable. Nothing has occurred to alter these facts. Indeed during the last century and a half they have often found a powerful expression in the thought of the age, though not in its social life. Even thinkers who have lost their religious faith, like Comte and Renan and Matthew Arnold, have continued to recognize the sociological necessity of such a relation.
Nor is there any necessary reason why a synthesis should not be possible between a scientific world civilization and a universal transcendent religion. On the contrary, there is a natural affinity between the scientific ideal of the organization and rationalization of the material world by human intelligence, and the religious ideal of the ordering if human life to a spiritual end by a higher law which has its source in the Divine Reason.
It is almost an historical accident that man’s achievement of control over his material environment by science should have coincided with his abandonment of the principle of spiritual order so that man’s new powers have been made the servants of economic acquisitiveness and political passion.
The recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order have now become the indispensable conditions of human survival. But they can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development.
~Christopher Dawson: from Religion and Culture (1948)
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