Butterfield on faith in humanity
/The internet is loaded with clickbait offering to “restore your faith in humanity.” Usually what these stories mean is “Here are some photos that will give you a temporary feeling of blind positivity.” While the clickbait is silly enough, otherwise serious people actually talk this way. But the unasked question—the first that occurs to me—is Why would anyone have faith in humanity in the first place?
Herbert Butterfield (1900-79) is one of the great minds in the historiography of the last hundred years. His most famous book, The Whig Interpretation of History, was an enormously influential critique of theories of constant historical improvement, a book that is still relevant. The following comes from his book Christianity and History, originally a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge in the fall of 1948, on the radio in the spring of 1949, and published in book form later that year.
This passage concludes chapter two, “Human Nature in History,” in which Butterfield examines how an historian’s basic assumptions about human nature fundamentally alter how they perceive, study, and present the past. Unless an historian begins with “individual personalities, possessing self-consciousness, intellect and freedom,” it will become “difficult to write historical narrative at all.” He therefore sets out to examine and defend the centrality of the study of individual human persons to the historical discipline and to push back against mechanistic or reductionist conceptions of history, explicitly naming Marxism a number of times though his critique, lo these seventy years later, is very broadly applicable.
Butterfield concludes by anticipating a criticism that his conception stems from religious belief (he was a devout Methodist), asserting first that the anthropological idea he has sketched is open to anyone, religious or not (in medieval terms, the view he has outlined is not dependent on revealed truth but can be arrived at through unaided reason, meaning anyone can—and should—grasp its truth.) Second, and more importantly, he contends with the idea that stripping out religious belief immediately moves a scholar into the broad, sunlit uplands of pure objectivity. Finally, he puts his finger on one particularly dearly held but unquestioned anthropological assumption perhaps even more common in our own day than his, an assumption that lies behind many of the catastrophes of the modern era—as well as a lot of insufferable feel-good pap, from Oprah to memes to the clickbait I started this post with.
It is necessary for me to emphasize the fact that what I have been outlining in this lecture is not merely a Christian idea—it is not dependent on the truth of any super-natural religion. We are concerned not with theology but rather with anthropology, with our ordinary doctrine concerning man. . . . [I]t is a mistake for writers of history and other teachers to imagine that if they are not Christian they are refraining from committing themselves, or working without any doctrine at all, discussing history without any presuppositions. Amongst historians, as in other fields, the blindest of all the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions, and blithely imagine therefore that they do not possess any. It must be emphasized that we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine of man which is current amongst us and which the study of history does not support. And now, as in Old Testament days, there are false prophets who flourish by flattering and bribing human nature, telling it to be comfortable about itself in general, and playing up to its self-righteousness in times of crisis. When it suits us we may set out to advertise the sins of one nation or another, but we bring in the moral issue here and there as it serves our purposes. While we are crying out against the crimes of an enemy we may be putting the soft pedal on the similar terrible large-scale atrocities that are being committed by an ally. Our own doctrine of human nature leads us into inconsistencies.
“ It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.”
During the war it was put to a British ambassador that after the destruction of Germany Russia would become a similar menace to Europe if she found herself in a position to behave over a large area with impunity. The answer given on behalf of this country was that such apprehensions were unjustified, Russia would not disappoint us, for we believed that her intentions were friendly and good. Such an attitude to morality—such a neglect of a whole tradition of maxims in regard to this question—was not Christian in any sense of the word but belongs to a heresy as black as the old Manichaean heresy. It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that anybody would attack us. There might be great virtue in disarming and consenting to be made martyrs for the sake of a good cause; but to promise that we should not have to endure martyrdom in that situation, or to rely on such a supposition, is against both theology and history. It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.
Again, Butterfield is writing during the Berlin Airlift, as the Russians—Britain and the US’s erstwhile ally—sought to starve the western half of the city into submission. One need not dig too deeply to find the self-delusion and self-righteousness Butterfield describes in the Allied conduct of the war a few years earlier; read FDR’s hopelessly optimistic correspondence with Stalin sometime. We could multiply examples.
A decade before Butterfield’s book, about a week after the beginning of the Blitz, CS Lewis wrote in one of his finest essays that chivalry “offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.” Lewis’s thoughts on chivalry are excellent and I want to write on them at length some other time; what brought his essay to mind in this context was his conclusion, which strikes a note similar to Butterfield’s, but with an even darker note of British understatement: “There was, to be sure, a rumour in the last century that wolves would gradually become extinct by some natural process; but that seems to have been an exaggeration.”
