The Bottom of the Disease: Lessons from the First Modern Culture Wars

Part I of this book brings the bad news. The old peace plans—getting emotions, ideology, or God out of the picture, which are the strategies we normally employ to help theo-political controversies go better—will not help us, as plausible as they might look on the surface. But it is not all bad news. The good news is that traces of a better way can be found in the story of the past centuries, like forks in the road missed along the way. Unsurprisingly, people fought about religion, politics, and sex long before the 1960s, and we can learn from how those past debates went. What we face today is not unprecedented, and that is itself good news. The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary civil strife for Europe. Its leading philosophers, including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, were profoundly affected by the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War. These were not just culture wars, in our sense of the term, but real, shooting wars, the effects of which lingered for decades afterwards in political, cultural, and religious controversy. The fighting not only took the lives of soldiers, but it also killed millions of European civilians through war crimes, general instability, and resulting famine. Some of the atrocities are memorably detailed in the etchings of artist Jacques Callot, Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre. The most important of these conflicts, for our purposes, are the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the English Civil War (1642–1651). These are of special significance because each had a profound effect on specific thinkers whose philosophy and theology shaped how the modern world, our world, conceives of theo-political disagreement.