Thinking beyond hype

January 22, 2025

An experienced and grounded mental health professional remarked in an informal and recent conversation: “Everyone I speak with is weary and anxious … they are certainly not ready for 2025.”

I have noticed this phenomenon. Even though time waits for not one of us, it seems that we are being pushed to a threshold of change for which we are neither willing nor ready.

While individual factors can be picked out – the media carnivals, the changes in political temperature, housing, food and energy insecurities, the obsessive presence of social media hype and rise of artificial intelligence everywhere – it seems that time and even free thought are in short supply.

It is reminiscent in so many ways of the 1930s and 40s of the last war-haunted century.

It was during that unstable time that many of the most courageous and original Christian thinkers felt obliged to come out of the safety and comfort of their studies, to apply attention to public and political concern.
Some truly enduring works resulted from their engagement.

One can think of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man (1943) or the last book of his theological science fiction trilogy, the powerful work, That Hideous Strength (1945). This work presented a bureaucratic and mythical dystopia which is in many ways more like our own postmodern lives than George Orwell’s 1984.

The exiled Italo-Bavarian Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) also went outside his professional comfort zone, attempting to apply Christian culture and thought to tackle both the totalitarian nationalisms and Marxist ideologies of his time. He explored an alternative controversial polity in the journal he founded and edited, Der Christliche Ständestaat (The Christian Corporative State, 1933).

In this, von Hildebrand invited guest writers and also sharpened his own personalist ethics and values against the blunt steel of dictatorships leaning over him.

Eric Metaxas, a scholar of German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote in the New York Times: “There is but one man who can stand with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both in intellectual brilliance and in bravery toward the Nazis; that man is Dietrich von Hildebrand.”

Especially anxiously engaged with the state of his times was the great English historian – sociological and cultural historian – Christopher Dawson (1889-1970). Reading him today can prompt our reflections beyond the distracting flickers of our uncertainties.

He was worried that people in the “free world” including Christians were being hypnotised by mass sloganising and gadgetry laden “deals”. He wrote: “We live in an age of economic and social panaceas – the Five Years’ Plan, Technocracy, Social Credit, Economic Autarchy and the rest.”

What was lost was the relationship between communication and reality. Instead of careful and reflective thinking and a grounding in the spiritual common ground in which virtue, poetry, imagination and shared aspirations grow, Dawson saw looming the crude and destructive booming of ideology of both the left and the right. Dawson wrote: “In the war of ideas, it is the crudest and the most simplified ideology that wins.”

In his latter decades, Dawson worked on educational and formational maps that would encourage Christians to be able to contribute fruitfully to the common good. They needed to be formed in all the depth of Christian culture and history.

During the 1930s and 40s, despite intense anxiety and chronic insomnia at the time, Dawson wrote some of his most important political works.
These include The Modern Dilemma (1932), Religion and the Modern State (1936) and the important Beyond Politics (1939).

In Beyond Politics, he warned of the exploitability of initially organic sensibilities such as patriotism. It could too easily slip into the jingoism of nationalism.

He saw no improvement in the 1940s. American historian Bradley Birzer cites Dawson from a private letter in which he observed that the fashionable and the “progressive” would come to bite the Church: “Modern theologians in ceasing to be poets have also ceased to be philosophers.” (1946)

We can never have too much of Christopher Dawson’s gentle and probing insights.

It is wonderful that our friends at Western Australia’s Dawson Society are encouraging a conversation that will explore the thought of Christopher Dawson and the issues so close to the Thomas More Centre.

Make sure you subscribe to the fresh and articulate writing in the Dawson’s newsletter. Please check their beautiful website and the exciting news about their themed conference of which we will take part, “Home, Place and Economics”, from July 10 to 12, 2025.

The Dawson Society website describes this conference theme:

“The place of home in our society and culture deserves critical examination. On the one hand our culture is replete with idealised, and perhaps clichéd, notions of home from The Wizard of Oz’s “there’s no place like home” to Elvis Presley’s “home is where the heart is”. Meanwhile in an age of increasing globalism, competition, and crisis, it can often appear that homes and home-life are considered last on the list of priorities, if they are considered at all.”

We have thoughtful hope!

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre

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