Customer Reviews

Dynamics of World History

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is awesome! Dawson was a professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University, but don't let that scare you away thinking it will be hard to read. It is written in language that us lay people can understand and relate to in a very deep and meaningful way. Dawson is Catholic and the book will give you an incredible historical perspective through Catholicism, however it really addresses all world religions and their role in human history and culture. Religion, Dawson believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of society's historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason, Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized (Americanized) Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historic religion of the West. Dawson maintains that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. This book shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible. If you're an active, faith loving, curious, sacramental Catholic this book will bring you to a whole new level of knowledge about your religion. This is one of those, `changed my life', kind of books in the best kind of way.

This book was quite a surprise. While so many people focus on purely materialist causes for the rise of western culture, this collection of twentieth-century essays by Christopher Dawson emphasizes spiritual roots. These essays are well-written and if anything have become even more relevant with the passing of time. Though many people probably won't agree with all of his conclusions, it seems to me that a reading of Dawson's work is essential to understanding western culture.

This book was bought with little previous knowledge of Dawson, and only a general idea of the subjects he discusses; but having read this book, and also now his (shorter) more strictly historical work "The Making of Europe", I know it was exactly what I needed. In fact, I feel that divine Providence was at work in my encountering this book. Thanks to Dawson, my understanding of the meaning (rather than only the bare facts) of our era of civilisation in Western Europe has been deepened. I feel I have a better grasp of the overall shape of our history, where we've come from and (therefore) where we're going. Dawson, I feel, writes with a combination of profound wisdom and sharp analysis; he is excellent on both the broader picture (more important) and the historical/sociological details and nuances (also important). Dynamics of World History is therefore historiography of the highest order. But more than this, his writings have a kind of prophetic urgency, which even after sixty or seventy years still seems to retain its power. Some people, I think, have objected to this aspect of his work- the "voice in the desert", if you like- claiming it represents too narrow and dogmatic (too "Christian") a perspective in a pluralistic postmodern age. But I believe it is this that gives his writing its tremendous force and also bestows a remarkable unity of purpose on all his work, which covers a great variety of topics and subtopics. Dawson made no secret of his religious convictions- but just as he himself says of Toucqueville, "he succeeds not despite them, but because of them."

Christopher Dawson is little known and under-appreciated in Anglophone Catholic milieux when compared with Gilbert Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both of whom preceded him by about a generation. In the mind of this reviewer, Dawson is much more worthy of being read, mostly due to his writings being much more well-researched than those of his predecessors.

Dawson, like Weber before him, takes an interest in the religious influences on the development of Western society and Western culture. But the main interest in Dawson's work is his reviving and updating of Christian historiography, of how the ancient cultures and civilisations evolved to hand down what would be the basis for the Christian world.

"Dynamics of World History" is an excellent snapshot of Dawson's pattern of thought and an invaluable contribution to the library of a serious Roman Catholic student of history who searches for cues as to how to interpret the significance of historical events as well as what to make of particular sociological and historical phenomena: for example, are we to be romantic nostalgics for the ambiance of row-house industrial London, or should we be aghast in horror?

Also of note about these essays: Dawson was extremely prescient in observing, in the first half of the twentieth century, that the "prestige of marriage" was the only thing keeping Occidental fertility rates high and in predicting that once this prestige was lost, Europeans would find themselves replaced by peoples with less sophisticated socioeconomic structures. Jean Raspail would observe just that phenomenon in 1973 in The Camp of the Saints and nowadays, few would question that it is a reality. But let it not be forgotten who suggested it first.

The some chapters, or rather articles, are much more interesting than others, in my point of view. The more interesting ones are so because they are easily understood by general readers like myself. The rest are those articles that seem to address exclusively the academic class and their particular professional concerns. In both cases Dawson writes beautifully and incisively. And most uncanny of all, he had a knack for accurate predicting of future cultural scenarios that affect the West today, which can only be attributed to his massive knowledge of history and understanding of historical developments. Seldom does one find somebody endowed with both massive knowledge and talent to communicate it.

Speaking of the process of secularization of the West in 1942: "There is no longer any need for nationalism or class feeling or economic motives to disguise themselves in the dress of religion, for they have become the conscious and dominant forces in social life. The ideologies which today form the opposite poles of social tension are not religious, but political, national, and economic ones, which have cut across, and largely obliterated the older socio-religious divisions which separated Catholic and Protestant Europe". In the same article Dawson, with all the dark notes pointed out about our state of affairs in the West, he never seems to lose faith or even to transmit pessimism, even though his message's implications are dark indeed, his tone comes calm and hopeful through all his pages: "...unity by forcing Christians together, as it were, in spite of themselves." This simple sentence is a lesson on how to say a lot in just a few words; and the implications are at the same time tragic and hopeful. And how true they've become! Just look at the shape of the West, especially Europe, since 2001, look into the Muslim macho dictatorships all over the world...

Look at this: "The three main substitutes for religion in the modern age, Democracy, Socialism, and Nationalism ... still arouse a genuinely religious emotion. It is religious emotion divorced from religious belief." It is reading Dawson and seeing Europe's malaise at the same time. The Muslim woman-beaters are at the doors of Europe and what do we do? Leave it to the U.N.; we really deserve that Muslims come and take over (but I hope not).

An irrefutable message to all hedonists around: "It is the fundamental error of the modern hedonist to believe that man can abandon moral effort and throw off every repression and spiritual discipline and yet preserve all the achievements of culture. It is the lesson of history that the higher the achievement of a culture the greater is the moral effort and the stricter is the social discipline that it demands." If you think the above statement is wrong because you still hang on to Greece as the evidence of a cultured society where pedophiles and sodomites thrive, think twice: "This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C."

Dawson sees the whole picture of world history, but never sounds like he is lecturing. He rather sounds like a friendly couch conversationalist. Dawson cannot be easily labeled and done away with, not then, and not even now. He would not fit the strict political categorizations of today, in the sense of being a liberal or a conservative. His vision of the world and world history is honest, calm, and Catholic. Like myself, you may have political differences with Dawson as a result of your own preferences, but his analysis of history strictly speaking, is impeccable. Past and present are so connected in his analyses that you seem both seem to be one, and if you stop to think, that's just how history should be taught: as a unifying frame, not as a sequence of independent events taking place in time.

Family plays a big role in Dawson's view of history. If you'd rather call government your dad and mum, I got news for you, I ain't your bro or couz. "... the breaking down of the old structure of society and the loss of the traditional moral standards without creating anything which can take their place. As in the decline of the ancient world, the family is steadily losing its form and its social significance, and the state absorbs more and more of the life of its members ... the state educates the children and takes the responsibility for their maintenance and health. Consequently, the father no longer holds a vital position in the family." Weirdly so, I would say, we are looking more and more like the Muslim families, only with the father and mother roles changed. An exaggeration, but one gets the idea.

While I was reading the Introduction and the first chapters I realised the depth and strenghness of Dawson's stream of thought.

His conclusions, in front of those of the widespread common thinking, are sharp and have a paradoxical revolutionary point of wiew dealing with Rationalism and Cartesianism, performing a genuism Catholic thinking that collects the best tradition of English Tractarians.

I very recommend the reading of "Dynamics" to those interested in understanding the chain of historic events leading to nowadays state of affairs.