Some events are so unanticipated and far reaching that they seem to create a new world, one that needs to be negotiated in new ways. They seem to be more than changes within an era: they mark a new era in which the previously accepted ways will disappear. The rapid and far-reaching actions of President Trump have been seen in these terms. But before we address the question directly, it might be helpful to set it in its broader context.
Historians warn us that the attaching of names to periods, and even more the assignation of events to introduce new periods, is a chancy business. At the time people in Europe, and even fewer in Ethiopia and Mongolia, noticed the light that flooded the world the day the Dark Ages ended or saw the sun shine more brightly at the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, some events do change the lives and institutional relationships of people far outside the centre of the event. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one such event that could be seen to open the Nuclear Age. Often, however, the events associated with the beginning of an age only make visible a change that has already taken place. We might compare them to the collapse in a storm of a landmark ancient pub, whose walls and foundations borers have eaten away at for decades. The town remembers the day of the fall but forgets its beginning in years of neglect. The dramatic destruction of the Berlin Wall at the end of a regime made sclerotic by its own corruption and the cost of total control may have been like this.
These musings might lead us to set within a larger history the recent actions of President Trump and their spreading effect on the economic and social institutions of the world, and so on the lives of human beings who have never heard of the President. Although they are significant, they may be part of a larger cultural movement. The aphorism of Pope Francis that we are not living in an era of change but in the change of an era suggests this. He used it in a speech delivered in 2015, so suggesting that a change of era had already begun.
Once we begin to trail through the past to find the sources of our present predicament, we find that the path winds back further and further into a dark wood. It takes us, for example, to the gross inequality in United States society and the vulnerability of workers, back to the neo-liberal capture of economics under President Reagan, the exceptionalism of the United States, and the ethical deficit in a culture that prizes individual freedom over the common good. Following that path may lead us to ponder the origins of a conflictual view of human relationships and of the larceny in the blood. We finally come to ask what it means to be human and what are the conditions necessary for human beings to flourish.
Few people want to go that far. Among those who did was St Augustine in his baggy monster of a book, the City of God. Its origins lay partly in an unthinkable event that triggered a cultural crisis. In 410, for the first time in 800 years, Rome was sacked by a Visigoth force. To appreciate its impact on Rome and on its educated citizens, we might imagine how people in the United States would respond to the news that Mexican gangs had sacked Washington. Many Romans, already alienated by the spread of Christianity after its legitimation a century earlier and by recent laws banning traditional pagan ritual, attributed the violation to the failure of Emperors to insist on the worship of the Roman Gods. In the City of God, Augustine argued that honour, hunger for glory and respect for justice had enabled Roman rule but was also susceptible to greed and division, that its religion had become a corrupting force, and that the philosophy it inherited was imperfect. Furthermore, the working of providence which shaped historical events was inscrutable.
Augustine went on to argue that the history, philosophy and culture of the Roman Empire found their completion in Christian faith and the Scriptures. They described the two cities: the earthly city composed of people motivated by self-love reaching to the point of contempt for God, and the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt for self-preservation. These were cities of the human heart, not the Church and State, nor dividing Christians and non-Christians.
The book was not a defence of the place of Christianity in the Empire but a reverse take-over bid. It was a virtuoso performance designed to show that Augustine understood better than his critics the virtues of Roman culture based on pride and the shallowness of its foundations. He also represented a Christian vision that would make it whole.
'Those who live by it will inevitably perish in the desert that they make. In the meantime, however, they will take many innocent people with them as they destroy the foundations of law, of cooperation and of decency in society.'
Augustine’s comprehensive vision was a manifesto for its time. It addressed a particular crisis within a particular culture. It retains its authority, however, as a model of the seriousness and depth with which we need to reflect on the wellsprings of culture in an epoch of change or in a change of epoch.
Underlying recent change has been a crude view of human beings that defines personal and national flourishing in terms of unrestrained individual choice to amass wealth and power, and dismantles the institutions based on the priority of the common good. Such a vision is inevitably conflictive and restrictive of freedom. It has none of the Roman virtues that Augustine acknowledged, but turns society into what he described as a gang of bandits. It both feeds off and creates resentment. Those who live by it will inevitably perish in the desert that they make. In the meantime, however, they will take many innocent people with them as they destroy the foundations of law, of cooperation and of decency in society.
These need nurturing. Augustine, however, also invites us to ask what alternative view we can offer of human beings, of the world and of our destiny, of its foundations, and of what it might demand of us. It certainly demands self-reflection, recognition of the gap between claimed values and reality, and exemplifying in our lives the values on which human flourishing depends. Slogans, irony, tolerance, trust in progress, denunciation, withdrawal or self-assertion will not suffice.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: (Getty Images)