Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 59

René Girard's Challenge to Fusionism

A serious fusionism today must face the fact that its ideal of freedom has not only relied on coercion to control coercion but also
on religion or myth. Freedom must remain the "criterion principle,
the guide" for Western civilization, as Meyer emphasized. But, as
he also argued, no principle can be absolute once applied, and
one must give due weight to other traditional principles. Minimizing the importance of tradition, too many modern followers
of Meyer and Voegelin simply rely on reason, philosophy, and science. As Girard once argued, however, these are simplifications of
a much more complex reality.
Today philosophy and science themselves have become the
problem. Reaching back to Plato, the "prohibitions of philosophy,"
as Girard calls them, have stressed abstraction and jettisoned emotion and personal desire, which ignores much of what humans
do. Neither reason nor philosophy nor science can be separated
absolutely from human emotion and its traditions. As the great
philosopher of science Karl Popper explained, both science and
philosophy need tradition as a base from which to begin explanation and to reach any practical end. First principles and axioms
must be based on what we already know, or think we know. There
is simply no escaping tradition, very much including revelation.
Today all ancient myths are exposed, all modern absolute
thought and ideologies exhausted-Marxism, humanism, rationalism, progressivism, even a deterministic science. The last remaining
absolute is an amorphous universal concern for victims, with no
convincing myth to justify it. In his Tales of a New America, Robert
Reich stresses the necessity of a "morality tale" to unite society but
says it can consist simply of "cultural parables" rather than truths. A
long look at history suggests that society actually needs to believe
its myths for them to have social value.
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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