Three, then four

Proverbs 30:29

A bird on a tree near the Rhine. Or one of those which neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them. Or a landscape in which almost everything has been heavily curated by man.

As a man, a German, and a mathematician, I like explanations, categorizations, and abstractions.

And what might be more interesting to explain, harder to categorize, and more desirable to abstract from than the mess we human beings leave behind as we move through time. Therefore, whenever someone lays out a pattern, I take a look and a few notes.

From pre-modern to modern to post-modern.

From Religious Man to Economical Man to Psychological Man.¹

From honor culture to dignity culture to victimhood culture.²

From sincerity to authenticity to profilicity.³

The last thing you see before the stone strikes the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashes them, are the toenails of plastic, painted in all the colors of the rainbow. And then what?

Yes, there are always three (st)ages, as William Briggs noticed in older examples, building on Eric Voegelin⁴:

There are always three ages of man: ancient, medieval, modern. Hegel thought there were three ages of “freedom: antiquity with its oriental despotism, when only one was free; then aristocratic times, when a few were free; and now modern times with all are free.” Hegel confused freedom with liberty to do that what is right.

Marx of course sliced his three ages by the primitive communism of the proletariat, the reign of the bourgeois, then the glorious classless society. Schelling “distinguished three great phases of Christianity: first the Petrine, followed by the Pauline, which will be sealed by the Johannine phase of perfect Christianity.” Synod on Synodality, anyone?

Comte’s divisions were a world “first theological, a second metaphysical, and a third phase of positive science.”

The difference between the old and the new classifications seems to be that the authors of the old ones located themselves at the border between the second and the third age, anticipating the latter to be final and glorious, whereas the authors of the new ones are children of the third age, yet unhappy, and uncertain about what will come next.

This obsession with time is a temptation that comes to all of us. If you think that by progressing from one stage to the next man will approach perfection, you have fallen into the Gnostic trap, and claimed that Man is God. Yet Man is not God. If you would prefer a non-religious person to hammer this home, ask James Lindsay.

If you think that the signs of the time are proving that the end is near, you have taken some (and then, of course, all) of God’s omnipotence, and claimed that God is Man. Yet God is not Man (God became Man, but that’s something else). Consider this example from my dispensationalist upbringing: the end must be near, they said, because very soon three Michaels (“Who is like God?”) would be ruling the world: Michael Dukakis (running against George Bush in 1988), Mikhail Gorbachev, and Michael Jackson. Well, Dukakis just turned ninety, and the other two were unable to congratulate him. Or think of the three worlds of evangelicalism…

No, the eschaton must be placed firmly beyond time, and not connected to the present by time. Are there tools, maybe, that allow for explanation, categorization and abstraction but avoid this trap?

Thanks for asking, unknown rhetorical questioner with too much time to spend. One of my favorite tools is the quadrant diagram. Confronted with a complex issue, you identify two dimensions along which you can organize observed patterns. Why two? Because one is not enough to gain some insight into the issue, and three is too complicated and not suitable for visual presentation. Within each dimension, you only distinguish between black and white, or plus and minus, or hot and cold, leaving the meditation about the grey areas to others.

What did Donald Rumsfeld say when desperately searching for weapons of mass destruction?

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.

So there’s dimension one, that of the facts. Some are known to us, some unknown. And then there’s dimension two, that of our awareness.

By transferring Rumsfeld’s three into a quadrant diagram, we gain a fourth – and this is what kept the discussion going. Can we do something similar to the three stages of mankind?

Take Campbell & Manning’s three cultures (of honor, of dignity, and of victimhood) , for example. By very close reading we spot Footnote 3 to Chapter 1:

For practical reasons we focus here on Western societies and their major moral cultures. Scholars such as Angela Leung and Dov Cohen (2011) argue that east Asian societies typically share a moral framework—a culture of face—that is distinct from the moral cultures we discuss here.

And there is number four! I propose distinguishing them by the extent to which conflicts between people are made public, and by who resolves them:

Now the seemingly inevitable progression from one to the next is gone. We might easily cross the border from victimhood culture back into honor culture or dignity culture – or even go straight to face culture.

Homework: do this for any of the other progressions listed (maybe start with Political Man, Rieff’s description of the ancient Greek philosophers’ ideal). I will fade out with some quotes.

Robert Hugh Benson, in “Lord of the World”:

There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one. Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God with which she did not wish to have anything more to do. These faint new instincts after something other than intellect and emotion were, she knew perfectly well, nothing but refined emotion itself. […] Yes, it was logical and sound. And it was because it was so that she could not bear it…

Fulton Sheen, in his 1979 autobiography “Treasure in Clay”:

In retrospect I had two approaches; one was the direct on radio, the other was the indirect on television. The direct was the presentation of Christian doctrine in plain, simple language. [...] There is a third approach to an electronic audience which will be in the future. It will not always be the direct, nor even the indirect which I used. It is what might be called the anthropological. I do not use this word in the sense of the science of man's beginning. I merely mean it as the roots of the word imply - a study of man. The presentation of religion had been principally from God to man, but now it will be from man to God. It will not start with the order in the universe alluding to the existence of a Creator of the cosmos; it will start with the disorder inside of man himself. It will take all the findings of our psychological age and use them as a springboard for the presentation of Divine Truths.

1. This is Philip Rieff’s categorization. I recommend Carl Truman’s “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” or, for starters, Paul Kingsnorth’s (subscribers only) substack post.

2. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, in “The Rise of Victimhood Culture”.

3. Hans-Georg Möller and Paul D'Ambrosio, in “You and Your Profile”.

4. Eric Voegelin, in “Science, Politics and Gnosticism” (Ch. IV of Part Two - Ersatz Religion).