What are we to do with ‘isms’?

They are everywhere: communism, liberalism, fascism, materialism, hedonism, Calvinism, Arminianism, Thomism. They sometimes grip us, but they also repel us. Some of us think of them as the problem, others as the solution.

Any kid that grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s knew one thing: that the world was half-dominated by a dark force called Communism. The Olympics included controversy with communist countries, and we stood in awe of their square-shouldered, hirsute female athletes. We gasped as they paraded their weaponry in Red Square.

Communism was the child of the ideology called Marxism, which we dismissed as idiotic at best and evil at worst. But it wasn’t until you got to university that you met people who were actual Marxists. Many of them held professorial chairs.

And then you got to see what Marxism actually was. It was a powerful, all-encompassing intellectual system which generated an answer to any question you threw at it. If you wanted to have a conversation with a Marxist, you were forced to speak on their terms. You had to understand alienation of labour, proletariat, means of production and historical materialism. Marxists were telling a powerfully coherent and sophisticated story about the world: a story that encompassed everything including social conditions, economic evils, and political theories.

And they tended to be completely immersed in their system. You couldn’t be a part-time Marxist. The system acted like the operating system on a computer: it mapped the connections between different thoughts, and formed new ones.

But, as history surged forward, Communism collapsed as a political system almost everywhere (China being the exception). Any map of the world published prior to 1989 became irrelevant. With the collapse of Communism, Marxism became discredited as a system of thought. It had missed some obvious things about human nature, such as the tenacity of religious belief and the fact that people quite like being greedy. Marx and his disciples had prophesied about the progress of history, and were proven to be false prophets.

Marxists gave up politics and took up literary criticism instead.

What came next was a suspicion of all isms, which in turn became an ism of its own: postmodernism.

The movement we call postmodernism was a reaction to isms. Like Marxism, it had a valuable insight: that when we build up impressive intellectual structures that look like they have the answers to everything, we become blind to their weaknesses.

An ‘ism’—what we might call an ‘intellectual system’—can be extremely sophisticated on its own terms and have an impressive coherence. Initiates to the system can find it compelling and fascinating, and they soon describe the world they see in terms of the language and terminology of the system.

But the complexity of the system can be misleading for a couple of reasons. The first is that the really difficult questions for the system as a whole can be avoided, because its premises are frequently assumed owing to the dazzling display of the edifice built upon them.

The second is that the system generates its own list of prioritised questions, but these questions may or may not be of any significance to the world outside the system. And the prioritised list of questions may mean that some really important questions are not heard, or completely misunderstood.

This is what happened to Marxism in the form of Communism, by and large. Where Communism has survived, it has only done so by being modified.
So what’s the solution? For some postmoderns, it was to abandon all systematising and instead to adopt a grab bag approach to thought. Systems are to be treated with suspicion. What matters to postmoderns is whether ideas work rather than whether they are connected with some nebulous idea like ‘reality’.

However, postmodernism is an ism all of its own, with its own claims about reality and its own ‘system’. It can’t pretend otherwise, unless postmoderns simply walk around telling jokes all the time (which some of them did in the 90s when this was fashionable).

So, simple scepticism to isms and the systems of thought they represent won’t do. In fact, it denies the very great value of isms.

Isms act like camera lenses: they focus on things about the world that we would otherwise miss. But they also ask us to commit ourselves to claims about the world and to live accordingly. They ask us to be passionate. And in doing so, they bring out some of the best things about human beings.

If total immersion in a system and total scepticism aren’t acceptable, then how can we approach them?

I think we need to treat them not as systems but as traditions of thought. Let me explain why I think this, and what I mean, because I have a theological reason for thinking it.

Firstly, because I believe in the God who is being, and who knows all things perfectly because he plans and directs all things, I do believe there is a ‘system’. Everything in the universe is deeply connected. There is an extraordinary coherence to the world­­­—to physical matter, to history, to the concepts that underpin everything.

Second, because I hold that human beings are made in the image of God and commissioned by him to order and rule the earth, I recognise that we are excellent at seeing patterns in the things of the world. We are good at finding meaning in things, because a) they are meaningful and b) we are equipped to see meaning.

But third, as a theologian I am forced to testify to the human tendency to want to be God. The tower of Babel is an emblem of the human aspiration to arise to the heavens unassisted, and to speak to the true God eyeball to eyeball. Our making of isms and systems is fraught with this lack of humility. And we see the devastating results dripping in blood across the pages of history.

It is not that the building of intellectual towers is wrong. But it is when we think that by means of these ziggurats of thought that we have attained a God’s-eye view of things that we are prone to cause widespread damage.

This is where the idea of traditions of thought comes in. That is, by using ‘tradition’, I am pointing to the way that systems of thought actually emerge from real people in real places in real history, and are then taken forward. They are handed on, adopted and adapted. They grow or decline. They cross-pollinate with other isms. They provide a place for us to stand as we try to make sense of the world around us. It is an appropriately human way to think about what we know.

When we see these great systems as traditions of thought we can stand in them and benefit from them while also recognising their limitations.
But is Christianity an ‘ism’?

I knew you’d ask that. I’d say that various sub-species of Christianity are isms, for sure. But the gospel of Jesus is not an ism, because it does not claim to give the answers to all questions. In fact, it reminds us of the tentative nature of all human knowledge. What it gives us is not all knowledge, but the revelation of the one in whom all knowledge resides.

This is crucially different. What we have is not a system, but a person. Our attention is not drawn to Christianity as an ism—although it does generate extraordinary, deeply connected thoughts about the world—but to the one person in whom and for whom and through whom are all things.