2022: The Age of Hitler, and how we can escape it
The age of Hitler is not the 1930s and 1940s: it is our own lifetimes. It is the period in which Western culture has come to define its values not by Christianity, but by the narrative of the Second World War. It is the period in which our most potent moral figure has been Adolf Hitler, and in which our only truly fixed moral reference point has been our shared rejection of Nazism.
Lecture 1: The Greatest Story Ever Told
Tuesday 10 May at 10.00am in the University Church
This lecture will trace the moral transition of British and certain other western cultures from the Victorian period to the 1960s: of how it was that the most potent moral figure in those cultures ceased to be Jesus Christ and came to be Adolf Hitler. The moral authority of Jesus and of Christian ethics was broadly accepted as normative even by agnostics or atheists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a moral authority that explains the insistent self-understanding of western societies in that era as ‘Christian’, for all their apparent secularisation. The lecture will consider how that value system fared during the era of the World Wars. In brief, it weathered the First World War and even the opening of the Second better than we might imagine; but the eventual moral impact of the Second World War and the accompanying global reordering left traditional Christian ethics looking wholly inadequate to the scale of the challenge, and indeed badly compromised by association with what now appeared as intolerable evils. Christian and non-Christian alike had their confidence in Christian values badly shaken. The lecture will end by considering how, in this context, the centuries-old concept of ‘human rights’ came into its own, quite suddenly appearing to be the self-evident, intuitive and secular truth on which a new age must be built. The experience and memory of the Second World War was fundamental to that widely-shared intuition. By the 1960s, despite the famous cinematic white elephant, the ‘greatest story’ in western culture was no longer the story of Jesus, but of the struggle against Nazism.
Which is good: but it’s not enough. And even if defining our values this way was wise, it’s clear that this postwar, anti-Nazi moral consensus is unravelling, and our whole system of values coming under pressure. What is going to come next? These lectures will give an account of how the ‘secular’ values of the postwar world came about, and what will happen now that the age of Hitler seems to be passing. They will show that for a new shared system of values to emerge from our current turmoil, we will need to draw creatively both on the newer, secular, anti-Nazi value system and on the older Christian value systems which remain powerfully present in European and Western culture. And they will show that such a creative synthesis is not only desirable, but also possible – perhaps even likely.
These lectures will be live-streamed and recorded. Graduate Seminars will also take place in the Old Library in the afternoons.
About the Lecturer
Professor Alec Ryrie FBA is Professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Durham.
