The ringing in of the New Year is a time of resolutions—and I hereby resolve to make some. It is also a season of recollections. It is with melancholy pleasure that I remember my philosopher friend Kenneth Minogue, who died nine years ago this coming June at 82. It is hard for me to believe that it has been so long, but there you are. I recall that my friend Bill Buckley died 14 years ago, in February 2008, and that seems like only yesterday. I am going to resist the temptation to rehearse reasons “why life speeds up as you get older” in order to say a few words about Ken Minogue, whose quiet but penetrating thought has striking relevance to this noisy, chattering age.
Ken studied with the great conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, whose urbane, understated skepticism made a deep and lasting impression on Ken’s thought and, through him, on two more generations of students. The full power of Ken’s thinking was already on view in his early classic The Liberal Mind (1963), which provides one of the most thoughtful, penetrating, and ultimately devastating anatomies of the liberal mindset ever penned. And he did it all with an ebullience and lightness of touch that made the serious business of criticism a smiling affair.
One of Ken’s most searching essays for The New Criterion was called “‘Christophobia’ and the West.” Published in 2003, the essay dilates on “the rising hatred of Christianity among Western peoples.” Ken’s subject was not secularism—that reliable coefficient of Enlightenment self-infatuation—but something more visceral: a species of histrionic narcissism Ken denominated “Olympianism,” the quasi-religious efflorescence that triumphs in secular societies in response to the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of traditional religion on the ebb.
Olympianism, Ken observes, is in many ways like a religion, but it is “in the interesting position of being a kind of religion which does not recognize itself as such, and indeed claims a cognitive superiority to religion in general.” Hence the hatred of religion—the “phobia” part of “Christophobia”—that follows the spread of Olympianism like a shadow.
Olympianism is the characteristic belief system of today’s secularist, and it has itself many of the features of a religion. For one thing, the fusion of political conviction and moral superiority into a single package resembles the way in which religions (outside liberal states) constitute comprehensive ways of life supplying all that is necessary (in the eyes of believers) for salvation. Again, the religions with which we are familiar are monotheistic and refer everything to a single center. In traditional religions, this is usually God; with Olympianism, it is society, understood ultimately as including the whole of humanity. And Olympianism, like many religions, is keen to proselytize. Its characteristic mode of missionary activity is journalism and the media.
Several things follow from this novel form of proselytization.
If Olympianism has the character of a religion, as I am suggesting, there would be no mystery about its hostility to Christianity. Real religions (by contrast with test-tube religions such as ecumenism) don’t much like each other; they are, after all, competitors. . . . But there is a deeper reason why the spread of Olympianism may be measured by the degree of Christophobia. It is that Olympianism is an imperial project which can only be hindered by the association between Christianity and the West.
There is, Ken observed, a curious political side to this development, epitomized by the multicultural imperative: the contention that all cultures are equal, but that Western culture is somehow less equal than others. You can see this at work in the phenomenon of globalization, which operates by spreading Western rationalism along with a deep suspicion of the values that made that rationalism possible. The resulting confusion is the “wonderland of abstractions” whose guiding prejudice is the belief that prejudice has been overcome and consigned to the dustbin of history (St. George rides again). “It reminds one,” Ken concluded, “of Aesop’s frog, who wanted to be as big as an ox, and blew himself up more and more, his skin becoming thinner and thinner, till he burst.”
There are many signs, I’d say, that the specimen is suffering from dangerous ascites, though what happens afterward is anyone’s guess. As far as I know, Aesop’s frog did not make a curtain call.
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