Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (137 page)

Moreover, growing uncertainty surrounded even the one too which the academic philosophers felt they could trust: logic. Two centuries before, Kant had asserted in his
Logik
(1800): ‘There are but few sciences that can come into a permanent state, which
admits of no further alteration. To these belong Logic … We do not require any further discoveries in Logic, since it contains merely the form of thought.’ As late as 1939, a British philosopher asserted: ‘Dictators may be powerful today, but they cannot alter the laws of logic, nor indeed can even God do so.’
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Thirteen years later the American philosopher Willard Quine calmly accepted that the definition of logic was undergoing fundamental change: ‘What difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler succeeded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?’
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In the decades that followed, many rival systems to classical logic emerged: Bochvar’s many-valued logic, new systems by Birkhoff and Destouches-Février and Reichenbach, minimal logic, deontic logics, tense logics. It became possible to speak of empirical proof or disproof of logic.
¹³
What would be the consequences for the theory of truth, asked one worried logician,’… of the adoption of a non-standard system’?
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Another, observing systems of modal logic, observed: ‘One gets an uneasy feeling as one discerns and studies more of the systems belonging to this family that it is literally a family, and has the power of reproducing and multiplying, proliferating new systems [of logic] without limit.’
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In a world in which even the rules of logic shifted and disintegrated, it is not surprising that modern times did not develop in ways the generation of 1920 would have considered ‘logical’. What is important in history is not only the events that occur but the events that obstinately do not occur. The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear. For many millions, especially in the advanced nations, religion ceased to play much or any part in their lives, and the ways in which the vacuum thus lost was filled, by fascism, Nazism and Communism, by attempts at humanist utopianism, by eugenics or health politics, by the ideologies of sexual liberation, race politics and environmental politics, form much of the substance of the history of our century. But for many more millions – for the overwhelming majority of the human race, in fact – religion continued to be a huge dimension in their lives. Nietzsche, who had so accurately predicted the transmutation of faith into political zealotry and the totalitarian will to power, failed to see that the religious spirit could, quite illogically, coexist with secularization, and so resuscitate his dying God. What looked antiquated, even risible, in the 1990s was not religious belief but the confident prediction of its demise once provided by Feuerbach and Marx, Durkheim and Frazer, Lenin, Wells, Shaw, Gide, Sartre and many others. By the end of our period, even the term ‘secularization’ was in dispute. ‘The whole concept appears a tool of counter-religious ideologies,’ wrote one professor of sociology
angrily, ‘which identify the “real” element in religion for polemical purposes, and then arbitrarily relate it to the notion of a unitary and irreversible process … [It] should be erased from the sociological vocabulary.’
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The secularist movement, that is militant atheism, appears to have peaked in the West in the 1880s at exactly the same time as its great rival, Protestant Nonconformity, so that Lenin was a survivor rather than a precursor, and his secularization programme was put through by force, not established by argument.
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By the 1990s, the Museums of Anti-God and Chairs of Scientific Atheism he had established were merely historical curiosities, or had been dismantled and scrapped. The once-influential alternatives to religion, such as Positivism, had vanished almost without trace, confirming John Henry Newman’s observation: ‘True religion is slow in growth and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgement; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself; it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.’
¹⁸
Perhaps the most spectacular testimony to this truth was to be found in Russia, where the collapse of belief in the Communist ideology Lenin had implanted revealed, in the growing climate of freedom of 1989–91, that both Orthodox and Catholic Christianity had survived all the assaults made upon them by the regime, and were strong and spreading.
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Throughout the world, while spiritual bewilderment, neatly classified as ‘agnosticism’, was widespread, it is likely that there were fewer real atheists in 1990 than in 1890.

Yet organized religion was full of paradoxes. Many of these were personified in Karol Wojtyla, who on 16 October 1978 became the 263rd Roman pontiff, with the title of Pope John Paul II. He was the first non-Italian to be elected pope since 1522, the youngest since 1846, the first from the Slavic East. Wojtyla had been Cardinal-Archbishop of Cracow. The choice was now highly appropriate for Poland had become the heartland of Catholicism. First Hitler, then Stalin and his successors had done everything in their power to destroy the Polish Church. Hitler had closed its schools, universities and seminaries, and murdered a third of its clergy. When the Red Army imposed the Lublin government in 1945, they were confident that the Church would disappear within a generation. Yet pre-war Poland, where the Church enjoyed special status, proved a less favourable environment for Catholicism than the postwar People’s Republic, where it was actively persecuted. The new frontiers turned Poland into one of the most homogeneous states on earth: more than 95 per cent of the population were now ethnic Poles, virtually all of them baptized Catholics. Catholicism became the focus of resistance to the alien Communist regime. By the 1960s, the Catholic priesthood was back to its pre-war strength
of 18,000. The number of religious – i.e. priests, nuns and monks – 22,000 in 1939, had grown to 36,500. There were 50 per cent more monastic foundations, priories and convents than before the war. Some 92–95 per cent of children received Holy Communion after instruction at 18,000 catechetical centres. Over 90 per cent of Poles were buried according to Catholic rites. The movement of peasants into the towns re-evangelized the urban population. Up to three-quarters of town-dwellers were married in church. Sunday Mass attendance was over 50 per cent even in the cities. These figures could not be matched anywhere in the world.
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Moreover, Catholicism was the driving force behind the new Polish independent trade union, baptized Solidarity, which began to function in the Gdansk shipyard in June 1980, achieved reluctant legal recognition from the regime two months later, and, under its fervent Catholic leader, Lech Walesa, gradually undermined the regime during the decade. A further eight-year legal ban, imposed in 1981, was finally ended in April 1989, when Communist authority began to collapse. Four months later, on 24 August, Poland became the first country in the Soviet bloc to appoint a non-Communist government, with Walesa’s colleague, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of a Catholic newspaper, as Prime Minister. The destruction of Communism was completed in 1990–91, when Walesa himself became President, and all remaining religious restraints were removed. This largely peaceful change of regime showed how powerful the alliance between the human longing for personal freedom and the force of religious belief could be.

The new Pope personified the paradoxical vigour of this ebullient Polish religious spirit springing from within the framework of an atheist state. He was a paradox in himself: an intellectual, a poet, a playwright, a professional philosopher trained in the Phenomenologist tradition which sought to Christianize Existentialism; yet also a passionate devotee of the culture of populist Catholicism: shrines, miracles, pilgrimages, saints, the rosary and the Virgin. He had been one of the most active members of the Second Vatican Council, summoned by the reforming Pope John xxiii in 1962 to bring about what he called the
aggiornamento
(updating) of the Church, and which for four years modernized every aspect of its activities, introducing a new, vernacular liturgy and forms of consultative democracy. The Council reflected the optimism and illusions of the 1960s. The mood did not survive 1968, a climactic year for Catholicism as well as for secular society, when a new Pope, Paul VI, refused to lift the Church’s ban on artificial contraception, condemning it once again in his encyclical
Humanae Vitae.
For much of the Church, as for the world outside it, the 1970s were
a period of disillusionment, of falling attendances, of declining authority, bitter internal divisions and fading faith, with thousands of priests renouncing their vocations. The Jesuits, the largest and most influential of the Church’s orders, were one example. When the Council opened, there were 36,000 of them, twice as many as there had been in the 1920s. This expansion was reversed in the second half of the 1960s, and in the 1970s the Jesuits declined by a third; the number of students and novices dropped from 16,000 to a mere 3,000.
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Pope John Paul II, reflecting the new spirit of realism, conservatism and the return to authority which characterized the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, carried through a restoration of traditional Catholicism. Just as the railway age of the nineteenth century, taking pilgrims to Rome, Lourdes and other devotional centres, had reinvigorated Catholicism under papal leadership, so now John Paul used the jet and the helicopter to make global travel a routine part of his pontificate, and drove in a specially constructed glass-topped vehicle, known as the Popemobile, to show himself to the largest possible number. Throughout the 1980s and even, despite his age, into the 1990s, he visited virtually all parts of the world, often several times, and attracted some of the largest crowds in history. By the end of 1990 over 200 million had attended his services. In May 1981 he survived an assassination attempt and resumed his foreign tours as soon as he had recovered. In Africa and Latin America, congregations of a million or more assembled for his open-air services. In Ireland half the entire population turned out to hear him. In Poland at Czestochowa, a notable shrine of the Virgin, there was a congregation of 3.5 million, the largest crowd ever recorded.
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These gatherings showed both the reach of Christianity and how much it was changing demographically. When John Paul
II
took office in 1978, there were 739,126,000 Roman Catholics – about 18 per cent of a total world population of 4,094,110,000. This body was a powerful educational and cultural force, since it ran 79,207 primary and over 28,000 secondary schools and provided nearly a million university places. In the early 1960s, Catholics from the traditional European heartlands (plus North America) still made up 51.5 per cent of the whole. But by John Paul II’s accession, Catholicism had become essentially a Third World religion. Of the sixteen countries with Catholic populations of over 10 million, eight were Third World, the order being Brazil (with over 100 million Catholics and by far the largest contingent of bishops, 330, in the Church), Mexico, Italy, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, France, Spain, Poland, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United
States, Zaïre and the Philippines.
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By the year 1990 well over 60 per cent of Catholics lived in developing countries, chiefly in Latin America and Africa, and it was calculated that, by the end of the 1990s, the figure would rise to 70 per cent. Catholicism was not only ceasing to be predominantly European: it was becoming urban, indeed megapolitan. By 2000
AD
a high proportion of Catholics would live in giant cities of over 5 million, many in the two largest cities of all, Mexico City, with a projected population of 31 million, and São Paulo with 26 million.
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While the highest numbers of Catholics were in Latin America, as a result of high birth-rates which had more than doubled the population since 1945, Catholicism was actually growing through conversion fastest in black Africa. A mid-1970s survey showed that Catholicism, which had doubled the number of its missionaries since 1950, had spread most in the general expansion of Christianity in Africa, from about 25 million in 1950 to some 100 million in 1975.
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By the early 1990s the number of Catholics in Southern, Central and East Africa was believed to be about 125 million.

Yet in the advanced countries, even Catholicism – despite all the efforts of Pope John Paul II – was not immune to erosion. In the United States, the figures suggest that regular church and chapel attendance on Sunday,
per capita
,
peaked in the 1950s (as against the late 1880s in Europe). Attendance among Catholics, as opposed to most other mainstream Christian churches, continued to rise until the mid-1970s, when it reached a plateau; during the late 1980s there was evidence of an aggregate decline, prompted by serious disagreements within the Church in North America over contraception, annulment of marriages (which became markedly more difficult to obtain under John Paul n), the treatment of homosexuals, the role of women in the clergy and other contentious issues, on all of which the Pope took conservative positions. Similar patterns were reported in France, Italy and Spain, though not in Poland and Germany. In Britain, where total Christian regular church attendance on Sunday fell below the 10-percent mark in the 1980s, an authoritative survey, the English Church Census, published in March 1991, concluded that during the ten years 1981–90, the English churches as a whole had lost 500,000 regular Sunday worshippers. Apart from Baptists, attendance at all the mainstream churches had fallen. The Church of England, the third largest group, had forfeited 9 per cent of its faithful; but the Roman Catholic Church, though still the largest, had lost an alarming 14 per cent. The chief gainers had been the charismatic and fundamentalist sects on the fringes of Non-conformity.
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