Indeterminate Historian
At the End of an Age
by John Lukacs
New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002
(230 pages; $22.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Jay W. Richards
As a historian1 John Lukacs is in his God-given domain, blessed with that most desirable of traits: He notices crucial details that lesser historians either ignore or wander blindly past. He is expert at drawing out the risky details of history, at reminding us—or teaching us—that events now comfortably settled in the fixed past were once teetering contingencies. Much of what has happened didn’t have to happen. History, unlike much of natural science, is the domain of the unrepeatable and unpredictable.
Take one of Lukacs’s favorite examples. We tend to believe the cozy half-truth that if Hitler had not risen to power in 1930s Germany, the inexorable course of history would have raised up someone else to fill his role. But perhaps we’re wrong. Perhaps the mass murder and atrocities associated with Nazi Germany were due, at least in part, to the temperament, beliefs, upbringing, and free choices of a single human being. Similarly, in his widely acclaimed Five Days in London, May 1940, Lukacs makes a plausible case that, but for the decisions of Churchill and his cabinet—none inevitable—Hitler might have succeeded in conquering Europe.
At the End of an Age retains this characteristic skill. But it is not a historical book, at least not directly. It is more like a series of philosophical reflections that draw their primary examples from history. The publisher tells us that the book is “a summa of the author’s thinking,” while Lukacs lowers the reader’s expectations, admitting that it is really “an essay, without scientific or scholarly presumptions.” I would say it is the sort of book that scholars earn the right to publish after a long and distinguished career. It is in some ways a loose collection of related thoughts, more like aphorisms than arguments. Nevertheless, it is easy enough to discern the gist of his argument.
According to Lukacs, we in the West are now living at the end of a historical period, a period that began some five hundred years ago in Europe with the Renaissance and birth of modern science and that reached its highwater mark in the Enlightenment and the founding of the American Republic. This “Modern Age” was essentially a European age, and its principal features were democracy, reason, and the rise of the bourgeois, of money, of individuality and the family, of institutional schooling, and of industrial mechanization. Each of these features of modernity has brought with it both profound opportunities and costs.
That age is now ending with an increasing awareness of the limitations and historical nature of all our knowledge, scientific and otherwise. In fact, according to Lukacs, the rise of a historical consciousness is one of the central insights and contributions of the Modern Age, and might rightly be viewed as its completion. Perhaps ironically, this historical consciousness subsumes the heady and arrogant pretensions of the later Enlightenment—scientism, materialism, objectivism, determinism—all of which sought an antiseptic escape from the constraints and particularities of human existence.
Lukacs describes a seminal moment in his intellectual history when he came “to recognize . . . the subordination of science to history—the former being inevitably part of the latter, and not the reverse.” But this is not simply a chauvinistic preference for history over science, since, according to Lukacs, the very discoveries of twentieth-century quantum physics lead us to recognize the inseparable unity of mind and matter, even of the priority of mind over matter, i.e., of our thoughts about the material universe over the universe itself. For Lukacs, this means that there are not two fundamentally different types of human knowledge. If in the hardest of sciences mind is increasingly “intruding” into matter, then we should realize that all our knowledge is imbedded in history, a history that is itself a human construction.
His is not an apocalyptic argument, nor a Luddite jeremiad against scientific knowledge and the technology riding its wake. On the contrary, Lukacs argues that since we now realize that there is no science without scientists, that all human knowledge is fallible and shaped by its historical context, we are led to a conclusion that is both humble and inspiring: “Contrary to all accepted ideas we must now, at the end of an Age, recognize that we, and our earth, are at the center of our universe.” He presumably intends to repudiate, or at least correct, that long historical trend, supposedly begun with Copernicus and embedded in scientific progress, of relegating us to cosmic obscurity. And just in case we miss his point, he repeats: “We did not create the universe. But the universe is our invention.”
Despite affinities between his argument and those of the so-called postmodernists, Lukacs distinguishes his view from what he aptly describes as these “confused excrescences of ‘modernism.’” Postmodernists rightly recognize that our time is post-something, but they usually end up in a relativistic cul-de-sac. In contrast, and somewhat inconsistently, Lukacs insists that “the historicity of our seeing and speaking does not amount to the relativity of truth.”
So far as I can discern, this is Lukacs’s argument, boiled down to essentials. And at this low level of resolution, it has much to commend it, especially as a corrective to the simplistic and reductionistic formulas of late modernism. But the devil is in the details, and a careful reading reveals a book that is, I very much regret to say, deeply flawed and confused. Rather than nitpick isolated problems, however, let’s consider his most troublesome claims, claims that apply to his argument as a whole.
Jay W. Richards is vice president and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the author most recently of The Untamed God (InterVarsity, 2003) and co-author with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Regnery, 2004).
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