Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 10

MODERN AGE

among Victorian skeptics of the very sort
Newman had in view when he complained
about the secularizing of the nineteenthcentury university-"bring[s] into existence
a society which generates its own immanent
basis for meaning."13
If society has replaced the transcendent
God of Scripture as the ground of meaning,
in the way Miller perceives, then Society
has become a type of surrogate deity. And
for many of those who regard Society as the
new deity, the university serves as the new
Sanctuary, the new Secular Cathedral. The
prominent academic Wayne Booth-who
abandoned the Mormon faith of his boyhood without embracing any other scriptural
or transcendent credo-is only too typical
in professing belief in "a God who is the
totality of Reason in Action in the World,"
with Society clearly constituting the World
in which Reason in Action makes itself felt.
And since the university is the repository of
the Reason guiding human Action in the
social world, Booth and others like him can
only be expected to regard the university as
"the last true church" where the surrogate
deity can be worshipped.14
Let it be understood, however, that when
secular-minded university professors begin to
worship Society, they rarely worship Society
as it is. No, usually they reserve their devotion and reverence for Society as it might be
if perfected along utopian lines. The dream
of making a perfect Society has, of course,
beguiled intellectuals at least since Plato
wrote the Republic more than two millennia
ago. But as Nobel laureate Peter Medawar
has pointed out, the utopian impulse has
manifest itself as a strongly "audacious and
irreverent" cultural force since the fifteenth
century, as Renaissance thinking and modern science have enlarged the scope of human
powers and as secular regimes have displaced
ecclesiastical authority.15
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SUMMER 2014

Though his sixteenth-century Utopia lent
its name to the entire genre of works about
perfect societies, Thomas More actually
depicts an imaginary society that differs
markedly from those hoped for by most
other utopian writers. As translator Clarence
Miller has pointed out, because More creates
a society with "both good and bad features,"
his Utopia "does not fit the ordinary meaning of the word as it came down in modern
languages, where it signifies an unreservedly
'good place.' "16 Zealously intent on depicting a society that-from their perspective-
is flawlessly ideal, the utopian prophets that
now receive the most favorable attention
in "the last true church" of the modern
university offer a vision strikingly different from More's. As a committed Catholic,
More would probably have regarded as a
strength the religiously informed family life
in his flawed utopia, where "matrymoneie
is . . . never broken but by death" and "husbandes chastise theire wyfes, and the parents
their children."17
In contrast, the utopian prophets that now
receive the most favorable attention in "the
last true church" of the modern university
are those who call for decidedly secular societies in which religion, marriage, and family
life are all weak or absent. In works such
as Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun
(1602), Dom Léger-Marie Deschamps's Le
Vrai Système (1761), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), William
Morris's News from Nowhere (1891), H. G.
Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905), Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's Moving the Mountain
(1911), and B. F. Skinner's Walden Two
(1948), utopian theorists have laid out blueprints for an ideal Society in which religion
and family count for very little.
When professors strive, as many now
do, to convert the university into a sphere
where faculty and students can defy all the
Modern Age - Summer 2014

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