After a century of bloodshed the fantasies of the Romantic and socialist movements stand fully exposed in the light of Gravesian psychology.  They thought they could build a world without rules.  They were right; they could.  But it would not be a world of orange creativity, or of genuine democracy free from oppression and inequality expressing a green universal human compassion.  It would be a world of naked red power.  That is the silent witness of the millions of the sacred dead in their mass graves upon the twentieth century.  You can shout: Down with Rules!  And you can abolish the rules.  But you will not build a creative community of caring and sharing upon the ruin of the rules.  You will only dig mass graves. 

And it is not just the millions of innocents that the Romantics and the socialists had destroyed.  They also destroyed themselves.  In the case of the Romantic Movement, the rejection of the rules and the elevation of creativity to cult status placed impossible pressures upon the creative artist.  For the denial of the rules marginalized the value of craftsmanship, devalued the years of apprenticeship and preparation, developing a myth that the work of genius should spring spontaneously from the forehead of Zeus, and not in an agony of parturition.  And it insisted that art is necessarily an act of rebellion against an uncaring world, which is sophomoric rubbish.  In the case of the socialist movement, the absence of the harmony of law has reduced it to an invariant rhythm track beating out an obsession with power, from Marx to Lenin to Foucault, and at the end of the twentieth century to Hardt and Negri and their Empire.  Indeed, the central theme of socialism is that law and property, the beloved twins of the bourgeoisie, are nothing but masks for power behind which the bourgeoisie unfairly and cruelly imposes its class interests upon a prostrate world.  The socialist never rests from piling up powers and reinforcements with which to ambush the businessman and the property owner.  The socialist does not trust rules, written or unwritten.  In so doing he gives up the vision of the society without oppression in which people voluntarily follow the agreed-upon rules without compulsion.  The only thing left is power.

The conventional report of the last two hundred years narrates a gradual and natural secularization from a community of religious faith to a godless world of egalitarianism and individualism, as though the entire period has not been wasted by vibrant and militant faiths that have swept the world like raging epidemics.  This curious situation has arisen because the Romantics and socialists who have done the scholarship and written the history of the modern era have not experienced their militant and world conquering religion as religion, but merely as “the way things are.”  Religion for them is something people do in churches, not in midtown Manhattan restaurants, at meetings of political activists, and in the ivied academy.

But if we dare to challenge this solemn orthodoxy and attempt a narrative that experiences the modern era as drenched in religious enthusiasm from top to bottom, starting with the first Romantic religious cult of the avant-garde in the early nineteenth century, and followed by the world-conquering religious armies of socialism and the bloody pagan hordes of fascism, not to mention the flagellant Bolshevists, then we can also give ourselves permission to see that the period since World War II has been also a period of remarkable religious ferment right across the spectrum of consciousness, from red impulsives to blue purposives to orange creatives and green communitarians.  And sneaking in the back door of the mansion out of which he/she had been sent by the secularizers is the reborn God.  For “humans seek explanations about how to gain the greatest rewards and avoid the greatest costs, and it is natural that most of them will come to accept general compensators based on supernatural assumptions.” (Stark 1985 p424) We could, after Robert William Fogel, call this great spiritual awakening the Fourth Great Awakening.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill