The last thirty-five years, though prosperous almost beyond belief, have been visited with social pathologies that reinforce the sourness of those earlier expectations. Our society is now described in such terms as post-capitalist (Ralf Dahrendorf), post-bourgeois (George Lichtheim), post-modern (Amitai Etzioni), post-collectivist (Sam Beer), post-literary (Marshall McLuhan), post-civilized (Kenneth Boulding), post-traditional (S. N. Eisenstadt), post-historic (Roderick Seidenberg), post-industrial (Daniel Bell), post-Puritan, post-Protestant and post-Christian (Sidney Ahlstrom).

Examples abound in which the images of contemporary society have shifted to decline, disintegration, atrophy, and so on. Arnold Toynbee reminisced late in life about his family's expectations around the turn of the century. His scientist uncle was wildly optimistic about the future, anticipating that a golden age was about to be ushered in by science. His social worker father, on the other hand, was rather somber as he contemplated the future. At the time he found his uncle's outlook exhilarating and his father's melancholy. By 1969, however, Toynbee had concluded that his uncle had been naive and his father realistic.

The case of H. G . Wells is more striking because the evolution of his thinking is marked by a trail of books that shows plainly the descending path. His Outline of History (1920) was a song of evolutionary idealism, faith in progress, and complete optimism. By 1933, when he published The Shape of Things to Come, he could see no better way to overcome the stubbornness and selfishness between people and nations than a desperate action by intellectual idealists to seize control of the world by force and establish their vision with a universal compulsory educational program. Finally, shortly before his death, he wrote an aptly-titled book, The Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) in which he concluded that "there is no way out, or around, or through the impasse. It is the end." In Wells's journey to despair Reinhold Niebuhr saw "an almost perfect record in miniature of the spiritual pilgrimage of our age."

A few examples illustrate the point further. A French Catholic philosopher: "The end of the Roman Empire was a minor event compared with what we behold. We are looking at the liquidation of what is known as the 'modern world.' " A British journalist: "I have to report the affairs of a world which has lost its faith, which is like a fish out of water or a drowning man, desperately thrashing around for lack of oxygen. Since the time of Christ there has been no period in which there has been the same feeling of. . . spiritual impoverishment." A German sociologist: "Civilization is collapsing before our eyes."

William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times of London, while writing of the hollowness and despair that have gripped Western society, has hope that Americans will escape the general malaise and retain an optimism that will serve to redeem the remainder of the West. But the United States does not lack for observers who disagree with him. In terms strikingly similar to those of Rees-Mogg, William Foxwell Albright, the distinguished archaeologist, said that American society is at an impasse similar to that of the Hellenic world at the time of Christ. Sociologist Robert Bellah believes that the United States is undergoing a third time of trial, which may be even more severe than those of the Revolution and the Civil War. With some exaggeration, perhaps, two social scientists assign the shift to despair to a single decade: the 1960s. Daniel Moynihan, now a United States Senator, believes that at that time a "set of untroubled, even serene convictions as to the nature of man and society, and the ever more promising prospects of the future, of a sudden collapsed. No one any longer really believed it." And Daniel Bell, a sociologist at Harvard University, noticed a plethora of writings in the 1950s on such subjects as a prodigious growth in productivity, superabundance, and the problems of leisure. All that has come to an end. "Paradoxically, the vision of Utopia was suddenly replaced by the spectre of Doomsday."

Now, one might object that this outpouring of pessimism reveals the disaffection with society that one expects from intellectuals, and that ordinary people are far less dissatisfied than those chronic complainers. Crane Brinton, himself a Harvard intellectual, made such an argument two decades ago, but it is hard to believe that he would be so certain of that now. A Roper poll commissioned by the U. S. Department of Labor reported in 1978 that, for the first time since that poll was initiated in 1959, the respondents rated their expectations for the future lower than their assessment of the present.

Of course, all of this evidence is subjective, and one could argue that if objective criteria were examined we would find that everything really is getting better and better just as we used to think, even if nobody believes it. We will have occasion later on to look at some of the objective information at our disposal, but there will not be much to support that rosy view.

A society conscious of its place in history is seldom content merely to note changing circumstances with no attempt to evaluate their meaning. Edward Gibbon's history of Rome made spatial analogies - such as rise, decline, and fall - commonplace in evaluating civilizations. In the twentieth century, organic phrases perhaps have become more common, possibly due to Oswald Spengler's influence. Societies are thought of as being born, growing, decaying, dying. Other terms are sometimes drawn from the social sciences or from the requirements of political propaganda. Thus, a society may be said to be coming of age, to be attaining self-consciousness, to be throwing off the chains of oppression, to be entering a dark age, to be entering a golden age.

We make such evaluations because we are not content with mere descriptions of events or recitations of facts and statistics. We want, rather, to be able to understand their meaning, and we cannot do that without having an idea about the end toward which those events are proceeding. Even the most cynical among us, if they have not reached the nadir of complete nihilism, have this teleological orientation. We can say that society is growing up (or regressing) because we have an idea of what a society would be like if it should reach a state analagous to mature adulthood. We can say a society is dying because we think we know what a dead society would be like. Or we can speak about the arrival of a golden age because we have in mind a state of full equality or complete order or extravagant prosperity, or whatever vision would inspire us to use such a phrase.

These teleological visions are agglomerations of values, often having powerful emotional force even if one is not conscious of their components. That is why they have the power to energize people in such extraordinary ways. Men may risk everything, including their lives, for family, for wealth, for country, for class, or for the kingdom of God. Even the cynic who believes he is above all that nonsense has established a hierarchy of values; otherwise he could not identify those values as nonsense. We may think his vision crabbed and deformed, but neither we nor he can deny that he has one.

All such visions are freighted with religious content, although this is often not recognized. They contain at least some of the components we expect to find in religions: a theory of knowledge, an authoritative literature, a theory of historical relationships, a cosmology, a hierarchy of values, and an eschatology. To cite an obvious example, Marxism, which some people still insist on calling a science, has everyone of those features. What more could anyone ask of a religion? Well, it might be said that a religion should have God as its end. But anyone with a hierarchy of values has placed something at its apex, and whatever that is is the god he serves. The Old and New Testaments call such gods idols and provide sufficient reason for affirming that the systems that give them allegiance are religions. The semantic difficulty comes in part from assuming that to call something a religion is to express a value judgment. Those in our own day who are pleased or affronted at being identified with a religion should ask why that is so. The biblical writers did not speak of religion as something to be revered, and there is no good reason for any of us to feel honored or dishonored at being so identified.

Christianity, along with its Hebraic antecedents, is by its nature historically minded. It rejects both cyclical theories of history and notions of the eternality of the universe. The doctrines of creation and of eschatology are explicit statements that history has both a beginning and an end and that it is possible to say something intelligible about both. Events between the two termini are also intelligible, and, being related to them, have meaning. From those relationships we may infer that general evaluations of the state of our society ought to be of great interest to Christians and that Christian faith has insights of close relevance to this discussion.

This raises the question of what analogy Christians are to use in understanding our society. It is a curious fact that the Old Testament, which describes the beginning, course, and end of a number of societies, never assesses them as being on the rise or decline, as progressing or regressing, as growing to maturity or falling to senescence. One might object that only a failed sense of history could expect an evaluation of society to take the forms that would be common two or three millenia in the future. Yet those particular analogies do not seem anachronistic for the time and place we are considering. The idea of cataclysmic fall as a result of moral failure is common enough in the biblical literature, and analogies relating to the life cycle could hardly have been foreign to nomads, herdsmen, and farmers.

Spatial and biological analogies are incompatible with biblical thinking because they are both quantitatively oriented and deterministic. To say that a society is young is to imply that on a scale between birth and the expected three-score-and-ten, this society is, say, thirty, and when its time has run out it will die. Spatial analogies lead us to expect that what goes up must come down; they imply a trajectory that can be plotted and an apex that is determined by such numerical factors as velocity, weight, and angle. In place of these analogies the biblical explanation of the end of societies uses the concept of judgment. It depicts them as either having submitted themselves to God or else having rebelled against him. Far from being a typical nationalistic exaltation of a "chosen people," the Old Testament portrays Israel as having become an evil nation, fully deserving the judgment that God meted to it. Its rebellion against God was accompanied by a turning to idols, and this idolatry brought the nation to its end. "With their silver and gold," said the prophet Hosea, "they made idols for their own destruction" (Hos. 8:4).

Idolatry in its larger meaning is properly understood as any substitution of what is created for the creator. People may worship nature, money, mankind, power, history, or social and political systems instead of the God who created them all. The New Testament writers, in particular, recognized that the relationship need not be explicitly one of cultic worship; a man can place anyone or anything at the top of his pyramid of values, and that is ultimately what he serves. The ultimacy of that service profoundly affects the way he lives. When the society around him also turns away from God to idols, it is an idolatrous society and therefore is heading for destruction.

Western society, in turning away from Christian faith, has turned to other things. This process is commonly called secularization, but that conveys only the negative aspect. The word connotes the turning away from the worship of God while ignoring the fact that something is being turned to in its place. Even atheisms are usually idolatrous, as Neibuhr said, because they elevate some "principle of coherence" to the central meaning of life and this is what then provides the focus of significance for that life. Niebuhr's principle of coherence corresponds to what we referred to earlier as the apex of the hierarchy of values. All such principles that substitute for God exemplify the biblical concept of idol. The bulk of this book is an exploration of the forms these idols take in late twentieth-century America.

Our argument, then, is that idolatry and its associated concepts provide a better framework for us to understand our own society than do of the alternatives. Toynbee was right to say that by the 1950s, "the crucial questions confronting Western Man were all religious," because of the inevitable dependence of a society's actions on its beliefs. If its actions are destructive, we must ask what it believes that causes it to behave in such a way. Now, to some people such statements are axiomatic, but others would sharply dispute them. Many social scientists, in particular, would quarrel with a formulation that ties behavior to belief, and that is a disagreement we shall have to deal with at some length.

For the moment, however, let us consider another kind of critic, much more numerous in our society. The emphasis on ideas and beliefs in this discussion does not find warm welcome in an age that respects the tough-minded pragmatist who disdains philosophy and insists on the immediate, the concrete, and the practical. But it is impossible for anyone to say that he will avoid philosophies and simply live pragmatically, because that statement is based on a philosophical belief that he has accepted without realizing it. Legions of ordinary people know how to use such ideas as inferiority complex, relativity, and pragmatism, although scarcely any of them have read a page of Freud, Einstein, or Dewey. Those philosophies may come down in transmogrified form, but come down they do. That is the wisdom in John Maynard Keynes's remark that "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

Our anti-philosophers are especially vulnerable in this age, because the media fill our environment with popularized philosophies. Marshall McLuhan was right in saying that environments tend not to be noticed (although he exaggerated the effect). We see many of their explicit contents, but the environments themselves are imperceptible. We do not see the environment, as Os Guinness says, because we see with it. That means we are influenced by ideas we do not notice and therefore are not aware of their effect on us. Or, if we see the effect, we find it difficult to discover the cause.

Given our media-saturated existences, we would do well to consider how Keynes's academic scribblers (of whom Keynes was one) affect us. Some academic disciplines, especially those in the social sciences, art profoundly anti-Christian in their effect, and it is difficult to counter that effect by dealing with their evidence or their arguments. The evidence is often good and the arguments sound. It is the assumptions we must question. These are statements that are presumed to be true but are not proven. No serious thought can be conducted without assumptions, but recognizing them - in our own thinking as well as in others - is vital if we are to avoid falling into serious error. Assumptions are beliefs; if they were proven they would not be assumptions. And they are beliefs so taken for granted that it is not deemed necessary to prove them. That makes them doubly seductive: first, because the careless or untrained are misled into accepting conclusions without recognizing their shaky foundation of unstated beliefs; and second, the very fact that the most dubious beliefs are so taken for granted by experts lends an aura of verisimilitude that beguiles the overly respectful into accepting them without question.

By and large there is nothing insincere about the way these assumptions are held. They function in some respects much the way religious beliefs do, although in academia they are seldom recognized in that way. And that explains the vehemence with which attacks on someone's assumptions are met; they are often attacks on that person's unacknowledged religion.

Although academic disciplines by their nature have wide divergencies of opinion within them, they also have broad areas of common agreement. This book takes issue with some of those agreements, sometimes with the evidence or arguments in their favor, but more often with the beliefs with which the investigations were begun. Soundly designed experiments, complete data, airtight controls, scrupulous honesty, and rigorous logic yield wrong conclusions when the original assumptions are wrong.

Unfortunately, many Christian intellectuals and others who influence ecclesiastical policy have adopted the academic models too uncritically. Peter Berger, a Rutgers University sociologist, has accused opinion leaders in the church of taking their cues increasingly from the "official reality-definers - that is, from the highly secularized intellectual elite." In an earlier essay, Berger had explained what was wrong with that. "Liberal intellectuals are always top candidates for the role of fall guy, for the simple reason that it is of the essence of liberalism to be contemporaneous and of the essence of being an intellectual to know what is contemporaneous." He need not have wasted his sympathy, for their wounds are all self-inflicted. These intellectuals must have been the people W. R. Inge had in mind when he made his famous remark that he who marries the spirit of an age soon finds himself a widower.

The irony in Berger's point is that the churches' intellectuals are falling for intellectual fashions that have used up all their capital and fallen into bankruptcy. It was hard to see that in the nineteenth century when Christians began retreating before the new ideologies. Now American religion is full of the contradictions and paradoxes that come from the attempt to merge a true gospel with the faltering creeds of the surrounding society. The internal clash is reflected in the title of one of Niebuhr's books: Pious and Secular America. Elsewhere, Niebuhr described the prevailing national religiosity as a "perversion of the Christian gospel," aggravating the nation's problems.

A pluralistic society heralds the virtues of paths that have no exits. George Forell, a theologian at the University of Iowa, has described the political movements that range across the spectrum from left to right as "rival deck stewards competing with each other about the arrangement of the deck chairs just before the Titanic hits the iceberg." German sociologist Karl Mannheim reveals the intellectual barrenness of thinking that one has said something when he has pasted a label. "Nothing is simpler than to maintain that a certain type of thinking is feudal, bourgeois or proletarian, liberal, socialistic, or conservative, as long as there is no analytical method for demonstrating it and no criteria have been adduced which will provide a control over the demonstration." Those terms have rendered service mainly as polemical devices to smear opponents and as shorthand methods of identifying friends and enemies. (This book will make some small contribution to civility by forbearing their use except to identify self-labels. Thus, when someone is called a conservative on these pages, it only means that that is what he calls himself.)

The struggle between Forell's deck stewards may usefully be thought of as a clash of idols, beckoning to us as antinomies: capitalism and socialism, individualism and collectivism, statism and libertarianism, rationalism and irrationalism, nature.worship and historicism, conser. vatism and liberalism, reaction and radicalism, elitism and equalitarianism. The conflicting parties and the media create false dilemmas, and the ecclesiastical leaders lunge at them as if the only response to a dilemma were to impale themselves on one of its horns. The issues of the day are so contrived as to create the illusion that every choice is wrong, that nothing can be done without doing some evil, and that the only question is which course of action is less evil. Reinhold Niebuhr - "the father of us all," George Kennan called him - whose genius did so much to reveal the destructive self-righteousness of the twentieth-century utopias, did not serve us well on this matter. Lesser men who learned from him that there is no course of action without its admixture of evil and that one must choose between evils concluded, naturally enough, that doing evil must not be so bad.

The participants in this struggle, along with their ecclesiastical admirers, insist that we have to choose between left and right on every issue, that there is no third way. But if we are successful in identifying the first two ways as idols, then it is reasonable to conclude that there must be a third way. The final purpose of this book is to make some progress toward finding out what it is.

The above was the Introduction to Idols for Destruction (1990), by Herbert Schlossberg.