Notes on Kurtz

Here are the highlights of Stanley Kurtz's essay, "Culture and Values of the 1960s"

“The cultural revolution of the 1960s was both a fulfillment and a repudiation of the vision of America’s founders” (29).

Civil rights --> rights of full citizenship for all, regardless of race, sex or creed --> led to…
…women’s liberation/radical feminism
…gay rights
…radical environmentalism
…sympathy for Third World liberation movements

“The sixties ethos, and the transformation of liberalism it has produced, is best understood as a secular religion, and in many respects an illiberal religion” (30).

“Perfect neutrality in the human sciences is neither possible nor desirable…Nonetheless, it is important (and liberal) to note that the insights offered here are available to the scrutiny and criticism of those they criticize” (30-31, emphasis added).

“Sometime during the past thirty years, liberalism stopped being a mere political perspective for many people and turned into a religion. I do not speak metaphorically. A certain form of liberalism now functions for substantial numbers of its adherents as a religion: an encompassing world-view that answers the big questions about life, dignifies daily exertions with higher significance, and provides a rationale for meaningful collective action” (31, emphasis added).

Kurtz notes that liberalism was “designed to make the world safe for adherents of differing faiths” but was “never supposed to be a faith” (31).

“The transformation of liberalism into a de facto religion for many explains the dynamics of something we have come to call political correctness, that controversial cultural inheritance of the late 1960s. The central mechanism of political correctness is the stigmatization of perspectives, many of them classically liberal, that run afoul of left-liberalism—a condemnation disproportionate to what might be expected in matters of mere policy disagreement. However balanced, well-reasoned, or rooted in long-established principle objections may be to, say, affirmative action, traditional (indeed, classically liberal) viewpoints on these and other issues are often stigmatized as racist, sexist, and homophobic—that is, as bigotry unfit for reasoned debate” (32, emphasis added).

“Why, then, have so many classic objections to left-liberal perspectives been demonized? Possibly because liberalism has become a religion in need of demons” (32).

“Traditional liberalism emphasized the ground rules for reasoned debate and the peaceful adjudication of political differences. One of the main reasons that politics in a liberal society could be peaceful was that people sought direction about life’s ultimate purpose outside of politics itself. But once traditional religion ceased to provide many moderns with either an ultimate life-purpose or a pattern of virtue, liberalism itself was the only belief system remaining that could supply these essentials of life” (32).

“Consider two important features of contemporary left-liberalism: the continual expansion in meaning of terms like racism, sexism and homophobia, and the tendency to invent or exaggerate instances of oppression” (33).

“The young students who now live in ethnic/cultural theme houses or who join (or ally themselves with) ethnic/cultural campus political organizations are looking for a home, in the deepest sense of that word. In an earlier time, the always difficult and isolating transition from home to college was eased by membership in a fraternity or by religious fellowship. Nowadays, ethnic/cultural theme houses, political action, and related course work supply what religion and fraternities once did” (33).

Talks about Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, which called the suburban home a “comfortable concentration camp” for women, and made “repeated use of Holocaust metaphors” (34).

“To the extent that liberalism itself functions as an illiberal religion, the principles that made liberalism what it was—principles like free speech, reasoned debate, and judicial restraint in the face of democratic decision making—are left by the wayside” (35).

“Left-liberalism as religion is one solution to the problem of life in a lonely secular world” (36).

“The Holocaust has become our moral touchstone…That is a problem” (36).

Kurtz argues that baby boomers longing for meaning after the Civil Rights movement of the early 60s created their identity by identifying with “struggling groups.” They formed a “new aristocracy of suffering” (37).

“Pasting together a series of identities, preferably rebellious and often fleeting, was more a way of distinguishing oneself from the mass than of forging stable connections to a given community” (37). Yet, Kurtz points out, this was “a required ritual of admission to a society in which everyone became an individual in precisely the same way” (38).

“The displacement of the icon of Christ by the Holocaust metaphor marks a cultural shift of considerable significance” (38).

Kurtz notes that for many Catholics, they cannot conceive of receiving marriage counseling from a priest. “For many, the connection between Jesus’ sacrifice of his life, the sacrifice entailed in celibacy, and the sacrifice at the heart of marriage has been lost” (38). That is profound, because it recognizes one of the main reasons our culture is screwing up at marriage so badly.

Kurtz talks about eco-terrorism for a few pages. He says they works by “inventing images of mass-scale death and oppression,” so they can “stave off potential holocausts” (41).

Kurtz says the debate over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) “may seem to turn on issues of public policy, but it’s really a theological skirmish in the ongoing war between two American cultures and their respective religions” (42). This is an important point because it applies to almost every cultural issue—almost all of them are theological skirmishes, yet the left frames themselves as being objective and scientific, and frames some on the right as dragging their values and their religion into it. The fact is, many on the left are dragging in their own religions—a mix of scientism, secular humanism and the left-liberalism Kurtz is describing.

Emile Durkheim
“The new religious sensibility is better understood as an outgrowth of developments first identified by Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology” (42).

Durkheim was focused on recapturing “in modern form, the communal spirit that had been lost with the passing of traditional religion” (43).

Durkehim realized that “the primacy of the individual, itself the outcome of our shattered social unity, now becomes our religion—the center of our reconstructed moral life. In the absence of relative agreement on the details of everyday living, our belief in the sacred character of the individual constitutes the last remaining basis for our collective moral (and thus religious) life” (45-46).

But Durkehim also realized that “no one is ever really his own marshal. To be utterly without socially imposed discipline, to be free of all normative regulation, to be under the authority of oneself alone, is to be plunged into anomie—a crisis of aimless or infinite desire. The ultimate outcome of complete freedom and undirected individual desire is, Durkheim maintained, suicide. To ask incessantly, ‘What is the meaning of my life, can end only in death. Instead, Durkheim insisted, recognize it or not, we remain in life only insofar as we ask, ‘What is the meaning of our life—here, now, in this society?” (47-48). For whoever wants to save his life [ The Greek word means either life or soul; also in verse 36.] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. – Mark 8:35

But students did not want outside restraint. “So the students who rejected Durkheim’s belief in the need for some collective moral ‘discipline’ would, of necessity, have had to restore it in some subterranean fashion” (48).

Kurtz argues that they did this by producing an identity in their “protests on behalf or rights,” but that, because of the “underlying individualism,” “of course it couldn’t hold” (48).

“Nonetheless, a reformation of the religion of modernity had taken place…the impulse to communal action in solidarity with whole classes of the oppressed, which had heretofore been concentrated in the European socialist tradition, was now synthesized with a radically individualist version of the dominant liberal political culture of both the United States and Europe. This moral-political synthesis increasingly took the place of traditional religious behavior as the source of meaning in life” (49, emphasis added).

Kurtz talks about the isolation of suburbanization for a few pages, and the decay of community and “communal sacrifice,” which led to the need for a new community and new sources of meaning outside of religion.

“The real political change since the 1960s is not the presence of conservative Christians in the Republican Party. It is, on the contrary, the rise of secularists within the Democratic Party” (53). He cites the 1972 Democratic convention as the turning point.

“That progressivism may be secular by traditional definitions, but it is best understood as a new and in important ways illiberal religion” (53-54, emphasis added).

“All of this means that for the foreseeable future, we are in for a long and inconclusive culture war. And that war is best understood as a conflict not only between religion and secularism, but between two competing religions” (55).