Last night I went to a house concert given by a friend and former student with one of his musical collaborators. This morning I was asked to describe what I heard, and the term that immediately came to mind was “Post-Newgrass.” If the term “Newgrass” doesn’t mean much to you, think of Béla Fleck or the eponymous New Grass Revival. Taking Old Time and Bluegrass instruments and idioms into contemporary compositions and improvisations might have reached its peak with Strength In Numbers, a veritable supergroup of pickers and grinners.
Listening to this music today can quickly take me on a trip back to 1997, when a rapidly expanding Information Superhighway seemed to cross barriers of space and time to connect people and cultures in exciting new ways. That a disparate group of guys, some from southern Appalachia and some not, could play a song about African tribesmen on instruments from central and southern Europe in the heart of the Rocky Mountains might lead you to imagine that all the people really could share all the world.
This period might have been the height of a consensus of thought that David Brooks describes in this month’s Atlantic Magazine:
We used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading—toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness, and liberal democracy. Progress was supposed to lead to the expansion of individual choice in sphere after sphere. Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.
Brooks makes this assertion in an article titled “History Is Running Backwards”, a title which assumes history not only has motion but trajectory. Later in the article, Brooks claims the assertion that “history moves in a linear direction” is a “basis of post-Enlightenment modernity.”
He’s right, of course. The Enlightenment faith in empiricism inevitably leads to a belief that improvements in material conditions constitutes progress in morality and history. (The fact that historiography has been dominated by Marxist materialism since the late 19th century has further enhanced our concept of the inevitable progress of history.) None of this, however, makes John Locke or Denis Diderot any more correct than Christopher Hill or Eugene Genovese, and Brooks is ultimately caught in their empirical and materialistic trap.
So too, for that matter, might be the people he sets out to criticize: the “Traditionalists.” For the purposes of his article, Brooks draws a dichotomy with Progressives (who he credits as believing in individual freedom, classical liberalism, and a linear motion of history) on one side and Traditionalists (charged with believing that history took a wrong turn, requiring us to revert to an earlier, more limited vision of ourselves and society.) While I’ll credit Brooks with setting up this dichotomy for the sake of brevity (just as I have reduced it almost ad absurdum for the same reason), it’s false.
All dichotomies are false, or at least artificial, and we have René Descartes — if not Plato himself — to thank for our obsession with dualism. Still and all, I contain multitudes and desire to create a dichotomy of my own. On the one hand are Brooks’s Progressives and Traditionalists, both trapped in a fantasy of historical materialism that is either trundling toward or has trundling right past a utopian world. On the other hand are loose amalgam of people and ideas that might be described as Post-Modernist or perhaps Post-Enlightenment and understand empiricism and historical materialism as only partial means of understanding the present moment, much less the past or future.
Brooks resolves his dichotomy in a very unsatisfying way that dismisses the Traditionalist return to an imagined pre-Enlightenment utopia while perpetually delaying the triumph of history’s inevitable progress. “There’s never been a tranquil resting spot, and there never will be,” he writes. What, then, is the point? Even Brooks concedes that “Freedom is great, but not if you don’t know what ultimate end you are seeking.” His prescription is to spark another renaissance in the humanities, but this seems either trapped in the Traditionalist fallacy he describes or doomed to fail in light of the impossibility of seeing the where the railroad tracks of progress actually meet.
I suggest that the resolution to the dichotomy I have created is to understand that we are here, now, and our ultimate end is neither behind nor before us. Having read about a quarter of Henri de Lubac’s The Mystery of the Supernatural and likely having comprehended less than all that I have read, I do agree with de Lubac’s assertion that our ultimate end is a gift of the Divine Presence which we can only dimly experience, much less comprehend. And while this end is not of the material and historical sphere in which Brooks’s Traditionalists and Progressives exist (despite his efforts to shoehorn the Divine in there), that does not exclude the possibility that the end is not present in that sphere. All that we have been, individually and collectively, and all that we will be, individually and collectively, matters for what we are ultimately called to be in this moment.
Last night, for instance, my friend told the story of his ancestor, four or five generations before, who had established an important hospital in rural Virginia after the Civil War but who had spent time before that conflict travelling throughout the Shenandoah Valley looking for work and playing the fiddle. The songs my friend plays are the songs his great great great (great?) grandfather played, yet my friend plays them in Colorado’s Front Range to people from Sacramento and Washington D.C. His playing is unmistakably influenced by the improvisational structures of jazz that have come into Old Time music through Newgrass, but now he works to use fewer notes rather than more, making room for a power which not his own. Some might make an entire career out of his flatpicking abilities, but he allows them to channel Doc Watson as a voice of hope for a region still recovering from Hurricane Helene rather than a fulfillment of his own ambition.
There is a tie to tradition here that doesn’t seek a reversion to a previous period so much as a grounding of our story in a longer narrative. There’s an openness that values freedom not solely for its own sake, but as an avenue to authenticity. There is joy in seeing how one’s limitations make room for another’s talents to find expression, joining with them in the unpredictably beautiful pattern of a patchwork quilt. A talented musician who chooses to play something that is not squarely in a progressive musical genre is not necessarily rejecting that genre.
Likewise, a person of faith who peaks around or outside of the culture of classical liberalism, capitalism, and empiricism is not necessarily rejecting those things or looking for a reversion to an earlier “tradition.”1 And Brooks’s claim that “Judaism and Christianity are not separate from democracy, capitalism, science, and the rest of modernity” is demonstrably false. Modernity, as it is understood in Eurocentric cultures, is most definitely an outgrowth of Jewish and Christian Humanism and Christian Humanism’s most visible manifestation, the Protestant Reformation, but that does not make either religion inseparable from modernity.
Brooks also misunderstands who Jesus is when he asserts that Jesus is not a supporter of stasis. Jesus is not so much a supporter or detractor of stasis in the material sphere where Brooks’s Progressives and Traditionalists exist as he is the stasis of the sphere as a whole2. Jesus did not so much turn the societal power structures upside down as expose the truth that those in power did not know up from down to begin with. Getting oneself properly oriented — up and down, east and west — requires knowing a bit of geography.
Digging and planting in a particular place is not necessarily an act of nostalgia for a simpler time. There is probably no better way to gain an understanding of how soil, water, and weather combine to contribute to our well being in a particular place. Knowing the names of the mountain ridges — the Blacks and the Balsams, the Craggies and the Unakas, Horsetooth and Long’s — leads to an understanding of who lives on their slopes and why they are there. Seeing a Redbud in early spring is not just a biological curiosity, it is a cause for joy because winter won’t last forever.
Neither did antiquity or the middle ages, and modernity will not persist forever either. That something materially or morally better will take its place is not inevitable. This moment is, however, inevitable. The promise of history culminates and regenerates in the present. If we will sing, a verse is added to the song. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we have not lost the tune, and it is given to us to chose the words that will sing what is to come out of what has been.
- Since every vision of the past is essentially a commentary on the present, it is hard to credit claims of traditionalism to be authentic to the past. ↩︎
- This is clearly a statement of faith and interpretation of the scriptures. You don’t have to believe in it to believe that Brooks misunderstands Jesus. ↩︎