A Realist Outline of History, Part One

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part essay.

Most diagnoses of our current cultural malaise have focused on either of two narrower causes: the ideological and idealistic, or the organizational and materialistic. On the one hand, critics including Patrick Deneen, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor condemn liberalism’s seductive individualism, arguing that Lockean ideology has bred religious indifferentism, modern moral relativism, and now post-modern psychosis. On the other hand, critics such as James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Thomas Sowell have long decried the rise of the bureaucratic New Class, faux-experts dangerously unshackled from democratic-republican constraints.

The first sort of diagnosis, the idealistic, rightly acknowledges that people live what they believe. Those who believe a literally idiotic anthropology live lives of lonely despair. Yet Locke’s simplistic Epicureanism has been around since, well, Epicurus, prompting the question, why now? A narrowly ideological diagnosis assumes the Enlightenment’s reification of culture, the presumption that a people’s beliefs are linguistic “raw material,” to be deposed by some better formula. History is then reduced to a rhetorical contest between philosophic elites (as with some Straussians). Yet any people’s beliefs are as much a symptom of their real living relationships as their “cause.”

As pioneer geographer Halford Mackinder insisted, every civilization is a “Going Concern,” an unimaginably complex mare’s nest of coercive and voluntary relationships—defensive, judicial, and economic; devotional, aesthetic, and architectural (like Milton Friedman’s famous “yellow pencil,” cubed). A way of life is impossible to reduce to a formula, and certainly impossible to generate from one. So, as Tolstoy put it, “some men in France wrote about liberty, equality, and fraternity, then other men beheaded or drowned a great number of their fellows.” Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel assumed that they could replicate the myriad achievements of cultural Christianity—Christian “theory”—with alternative, abstract anthropologies. What they achieved was a Confusion of Tongues.

Meanwhile, nurtured by Christian service, populations grew, and technology, urbanization, and mass communications marched on. This fueled an inevitable growth of public bureaucracy, while the intellectuals blithely assumed that they led the parade.

The second sort of diagnosis, the materialistic, is grounded in the real, productive relationships of a living society and its ruling regime, but it ignores the fact that this concrete organization of life itself imports a new anthropology or cosmology. Natural regimes or states arise to meet the brute necessities of a particular people in their time and place: “some need we have of one another,” as Socrates’ young friend says (Rep. II). Material necessities seem non-negotiable, so natural regimes are necessarily coercive in their division of labor and in everything they do. In the absence of an enduring, visible dissenting witness (spoiler alert: Christianity), any regime’s dominion is the compelling argument for the nature of the Cosmos: the implacable heaven of theocratic mandarins, tragic battlegrounds of heroic warriors, or plunder of oligarchs.

A people’s concrete organization and its “metaphysic” form a single way of life and develop in a symbiotic relationship. Considering warrior regimes, for example, pagan Apaches, Shinto samurai, and Christian knights share cultural qualities such as their insatiable appetite for heroic epics. But between them, the status of women varies dramatically indeed. Christian theocracies (Byzantium), oligarchies (Venice), and republics (Switzerland) all repudiate child sacrifice, contrary to Carthage’s oligarchic norm.

Realism: Uniting Body and Soul, Regime and Society

We must connect the dots between the metaphysical and structural diagnoses of the new regime and its implicit cosmology. Our current bureaucratic insurgency is like the German warrior bands, surging over the frozen Rhine. De Tocqueville warned two hundred years ago that a democratic republic faced the baleful prospect of a bureaucratic tyranny. And as Plato suggests, a new regime itself imports a generic cosmology, as German warriors initially overlaid the old theocratic Empire with a brutal cosmos of tragic heroism. Today, we’re being overlain by a cosmos of mechanical indifference by an inevitable—but not hopeless—bureaucratic regime.

For five hundred years, Christians have been distracted by a contest of ideologies, the “treason of the intellectuals.” Epicurean propagandists as old as Marsilius, Machiavelli, and Montaigne mocked the Good News of Original Sin as priestly duplicity, to promote a “natural” happiness. They took for granted the benefits of Christian culture, the sap of the branch beneath them, while underestimating human malice and despair. Seeing only Christian docility and blind to the Church’s prodigious cultural achievement, Hobbes and Rousseau concluded that human nature is utterly malleable.

Ever since, intellectuals have competed to impose badly sketched cartoons of human destiny onto a Christian civilization. They took for granted the uniquely Christian achievement of voluntary societies with substantial autonomy from their coercive regimes.

Sometimes, a collision of interests is an opportunity for legislators to recast a regime. Like Solon’s Athens, the Glorious Revolution, or the American Founding, this works only if they work within the limitations and aspirations of the broader society. Their success is measured not by an abstract legitimacy, but by a new and enduring concord. Asked if he’d given Athenians the best law, Solon famously replied, “The best they could accept.” Where the concrete limitations of the “Going Concern” are not respected (like the French National Assembly outlawing hunger), the result is catastrophe (like the Terror). The distinction between founding legislators and revolutionary ideologues is crucial when we later consider the American founding.

Throughout history, given inevitable demographic change, peace-loving Christian societies have enjoyed an incomparable continuity (even the invention of history), despite their perennial confrontations with new regimes. This Western exceptionalism—personal rights, free association, liberal education, limited government, and natural science—arose only given their sacrificial service in teaching, nursing, and sheltering the poor: free services of love.

With the growth of population, trade, and communications, the progress of bureaucracy was inevitable. As in our previous epochs, the practical challenge is how to evangelize it.

Christian Societies’ Challenge to New Regimes

Only the Christian Gospel nurtures an enduring, dissenting witness to the raw power of a natural regime, what Nietzsche condemned as “the overturning of all values.” Yet this confirms the counterintuitive axiom that even natural happiness is found, not in dominion, but in sacrificial love. Perennially, the Church generates innumerable, voluntary little societies of love, founded not on “some need we have of each other” (as Socrates’ friend says), but on the need others have of us, “the art of the ruler serving the ruled” (Rep. I)

The Church has always earned an independent moral authority and witness for its loving God with familial services of teaching, sheltering, and nursing. As witnesses of love, these services must be voluntary, personal, and sacrificial. This loving society is always in tension with coercive States, busily implementing their core (and justifiable) necessities of defense, civil justice, and public works. Its duties are necessarily mandatory, categorical, and monetary. Limited within a horizon of a substantive code of justice, the State cannot care sacrificially for the Imago Dei in each unique person. The perennial challenge is adapting the State to the fact that love liberated is simply more pragmatic, working infinitely better than public regulations.

Tragically, as we’ll see, over the past century, progressive Christian denominations downloaded their charitable duties—services of love—onto the public administration. By abandoning their familial responsibilities, they voided their witness of love and moral authority. As Plato said, regimes fall when their officers themselves—the religious elite—betray their visible, defining purpose. Rendered into bureaucratic protocols and administered by anonymous bureaucrats, these personal services were necessarily corrupted. Liberal education became occupational training and now public propaganda. Nursing became medical protocols and now herd management. Shelter became welfare dependency and now tribal subsidies

The new regime can and must be moderated by representative institutions, but this is possible only with a persistent Christian witness. We need prudent, sacrificial witness in the loving services of teaching, nursing, and shelter, elevating the family. If that seems improbable, consider the Benedictines of the 10th century. Monasteries were little islands of love in a sea of brutal warriors. Yet over time, they taught reverence for women and chastity as manly virtues to the unlettered sons of fratricidal chieftains, an unimaginable cultural achievement.

Natural Regimes and the Worship of Power

Outside the West, there’s never been the distinction of Church and State. The State has always trumpeted its Divine authority, so Classical political science stressed the unity of the regime, the visible human character of different forms of sovereignty. Warrior regimes (like the Samurai or Apaches) saw the Cosmos as a glorious battleground for a glorious death. Oligarchic regimes (like Carthage) saw the universe as a treasure vault for industrious larceny. Democratic regimes (like pagan Athens) saw the world as a stage for salacious spectacle. Given the press of its local urgencies and opportunities, a definable human type always rises to unquestionable, coercive visibility and therefore oracular power.

The Christian West’s succession of ruling offices bears an eerie resemblance to the “tragic decline” of regimes in Plato’s Republic. The improbable rule of his Philosopher King was pantomimed by Rome’s Pontifex Maximus and his imperial bureaucracy. For Christianity’s first 500 years, sacrificial theologian-bishops fought ceaselessly to preserve their freedom from his Caesaro-papist pretensions. Over the next 500 years, Germanic warriors provided the anarchy, within which spontaneous monasteries nurtured the institutional autonomy and spontaneity of Christian social services. Then came the oligarchic nationalism of the Renaissance and Reformation, post-Enlightenment democracies, and now, “doubling-back” through the post-Woodstock “tyranny of relativism,” monolithic bureaucracy.

Thinking outside one’s regime is almost impossible. One instructive example is the attempted coup by Japanese samurai at the end of World War II, defying the divine Emperor’s call to surrender. Glorifying death, engrossed in a cosmic battlefield, these unwavering warriors embraced collective annihilation, even after two atomic bombs. They clung to their traditional duty to “smash the gems”—destroy everything, rather than let it be taken as booty by their enemies. This seems insane, yet in the light of Christian revelation, most natural regimes seem suicidal.

To some extent, our budding bureaucratic rulers have already imported their faith in a merciless, impersonal universe. Like simmering frogs, we’ve already accepted as normal what, sixty years ago, we would have considered malicious psychosis. Historically, the ultimate terminus of a fully developed imperial economy is an Oriental Despotism, and we’re almost there.

The State That Swallows Society

The inner dynamics of a theocracy or bureaucratic regime were first dissected by the Marxist defector Karl Wittfogel in his cancelled masterpiece, Oriental Despotism (Yale, 1962). In 500 dense pages of comparative political economics, Wittfogel argues that any fully developed imperial economy and unfettered State ultimately consumes its entire Society. It absorbs all property into the public domain, mutates all private enterprise into public works, and reduces its subjects to anonymous work levies and military drafts, all under the temple guards of a deified sovereign.

Barring disasters, natural or military, this is humanity’s natural political destiny.

The bureaucratic regime’s absolute power naturally and inevitably evangelizes a mechanistic, impersonal, and despotic universe, which in turn legitimates the State’s absolute power. In Archaic times, its authority was wielded by priest-scientists, Egyptian astronomers, or Chinese mandarins. At its best, Confucianism respected its peasants’ natural religion of ancestor worship, yet its cosmology was frozen, impersonal, and merciless. The peasants of Babylon and Egypt were kept busy and docile between harvesting and planting by building sacred temples. At their worst, Aztec public works greased the gears of a ravenous cosmos with the blood of tens of thousands of real human beings, sacrificed to their demonic butterfly god.

Contemplating the Aztec example: only rationalistic human beings, prostrate beneath a cold and merciless zodiac, could let themselves be slaughtered with such fatalistic docility. No purely instinctual animal could ever submit to such butchery. In a four-day festival, forty thousand real people are marched up Tenochtitlan Temple, to have their hearts ripped out and gaping bodies flopped down the pyramid’s four sides, thoroughly baptizing it in blood. Imagine the flies. Yet no one resisted. Pace Rousseau, such is natural humanity’s expectation of Divine Retribution.

Today, such authority is claimed by Marxist historical science, with four million Ukrainians massacred in Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, or 40 million in Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In the West, Catastrophic Scientism, scientists corrupted by State patronage, claim the same priestly wisdom, wielding the absolutist Precautionary Principle. Human nature abhors a spiritual vacuum; so they can inflict the ritual sacrifices of epidemiology, climatology , and environmentalism upon a docile society, in propitiation for our common sin of being human. The promise of Progressivism—ubiquitous bureaucracy—has mutated from “maximizing Good” into “forestalling Evil.”

Such universal malice is not, of course, inevitable under a bureaucracy, and every sort of natural regime can provide equally malicious examples. But it gives pause to think that the British Museum recently celebrated the “beauty” of Aztec art, cartoons capable of admiration only if one abstracts from—the sin of bureaucracy—the real human persons being slaughtered.

Bureaucratic dominion arises naturally in public works, like China’s great irrigation canals. In a work levy, we question our fate no more than ants in an anthill. When bureaucracy absorbs all enterprise, as Thomas Sowell says, “procedures are everything, and results, nothing.” People are mere numbers, as in Stalin’s quip: “One death is a tragedy; ten thousand, a statistic.” This dehumanizing authority is now wielded by public health administrators like Britain’s National Health Service: statistical science reducing personal care to drug protocols, and human flourishing to a biochemical bell curve. Coerced medical infanticide is accepted with a shrug. Yet the British apparently love their NHS.

The real mystery is not the challenge of the Total State to Christian society, but how Western exceptionalism happened at all. Other civilizations rise and fall with their coercive regimes, yet, as Chesterton quipped, Christianity has been “not a sinking ship, but a submarine.” Somehow, free Christian societies have endured half-millennia each of theocratic Roman emperors, German warrior chiefs, oligarchic aristocrats, and nationalistic parliaments.

How could Christian society be inundated by such diverse and brutal masters, then survive and humanize? The Church witnessed to a universal, supernatural love, overshadowing any local rule of necessity, a distinction Augustine defined as the City of God versus the City of Man.

Monarchs with Theological Pretensions

At the dawn of Western exceptionalism, the Church earned an independent moral authority. This was not in spite of its powerlessness, but because of it. When neo-pagan Emperor Julian, Constantine’s grandson, tried to revive the old paganism, he found the Church’s charity put it beyond his reach: “The impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also,” he whined. “Welcoming them into their agapae, they draw them as children are drawn by cakes.”

Yet cultural axioms die hard, especially in ruling offices. The emperor was Rome’s Pontifex Maximus, Supreme Priest. The Edict of Toleration may have ended mass persecutions, but with the Church challenged by heresies, the emperors insisted on adjudicating our disputes. Their political instinct was to force a consensus, mushy middles for public peace, thus betraying the paradoxical Gospel.

Resisting a theocratic State, the Church’s sacrificial witnesses were its persecuted theologian-bishops, like heroic Athanasius and Ambrose. Their achievement was hammering out permanent (and paradoxical) teachings of the Christ’s “perfect divinity and perfect humanity,” and the Trinity as “one God of three Persons.” They were ready to die for the Gospel, and sometimes did, until the emperors gradually lost their appetite for persecuting them.

While the Western Empire fell in the late fourth century, the Byzantine East endured for another thousand years under theocratic Caesars. So, in the late fifth century West, now submerged under the brutal Ostrogoths, Rome’s bishop Gelasius wrote to Constantinople’s Emperor Anastasius that Christ himself “separated the two ministries for the following ages”—geographically, the sacred from the worldly—“so no one might be proud.” This defined the uniquely Western political theology, down to and including the American First Amendment.

In the East, Roman emperors still asserted their right to adjudicate doctrinal disputes, like the ninth-century Iconoclast Controversy. Powerless Byzantine bishops, including St. John Damascene, successfully resisted the arrogance, often to their death. Yet, even after Constantinople finally fell in 1453, that vaguely theocratic civilization endured as Orthodox Christianity, fractured into national churches and tragically submissive to autocratic monarchs.

Parenthetically, Western Christianity might have suffered the same fate with Charlemagne’s false dawn, the new “Emperor of the Romans.” After a half-century of relative peace, however, his reconstruction crumbled under a fresh onslaught of Vikings and Magyars, so by the tenth century, his organs of defense and justice were again shredded. Yet, his “schoolmaster,” Alcuin, had used that half-century to build an enduring culture—a culture that’s come down to us as Classical Education. He standardized the monastic copiers’ script as Carolingian miniscule—now Times New Roman. He baptized language instruction as the Trivium, and science as the Quadrivium. He then delivered this curriculum to thousands of scattered monasteries, independent “points of light,” undefended, but teaching, nursing, and sheltering as they might.

How did Christianity plant the axioms of a free society in the West?

It was blessed with anarchy, forcing its witness into spontaneous, voluntary, self-sufficient monasteries. The Enlightenment literati had assumed that the old scriptoria were filled with block-headed peasants, ignorant of what they copied. But less arrogant scholars like C.H. Haskins, Christopher Dawson, (early) Lynn Whyte, Kenneth Clarke, Rodney Stark, and Tom Holland have now shown that those loving monks not only read the books, but built the moral framework of Western Civilization.

• Part two of this essay will be posted on April 16, 2026.