Unlike his previous two books, which were coming of age, bildungsroman narratives, after reading Rod Dreher’s latest work The Benedict Option: a Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017) I find that it falls under that vast genre of books (both fiction and non) that try to apprehend the spirit of the times in which they are written, those books that try to explain the zeitgeist. I mean books like:
- Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007)
- Allister MacIntyre’s After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory (1984)
- Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996)
- David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996)
- Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (Submission) (2015)
- Allan Jacob’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011) as well as his latest “Anthropocene Project.â€
(Forgive me for giving only white male examples; these were the ones that spontaneously popped into my head; everyone from everywhere has written about the zeitgeist.)
These books try to understand and articulate the moments in which they were written. If they contain predictions about the future (and almost all of them do), those predictions are only modest side-effects stemming from the cause for which they are written. Prophets speak of the future, but these books speak of the present, though they find things to revere from the past.
Such [as] are greedy of fame [,] as think it not foolhardy to attempt the works of Bacon, of Shakespeare, of Newton must devote themselves to the diligent study of the Spirit of the age in which they live.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson[i]
See also “Reading About Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (Part II).”
[i] Journals and miscellaneous notebooks. Vol. II: 1822–1826. Edited by William H. Gilman et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1960–82. July 8, 1824, p. 255.
