THE NEW WORLD OF THE GOTHIC FOX
197
which different cultural traditions achieve consummation at the same
time. This has not been the case in the past. It should not surprise us to
learn that the Spanish Counter-Reformation is a creature of the six–
teenth and seventeenth centuries, while the English Industrial Revolution
has dominated our world since the closing decades of the eighteenth
century. The reason why I chose to compare these towering cultural
achievements is not because they occurred contemporaneously, but be–
cause they are the most visible, complex, and demanding, and therefore
the best for purposes of comparison, of the many cultural artifacts gener–
ated by each of these two great cultural traditions.
The Spanish Counter-Reformation was immensely successful. It
pushed forward and settled the boundaries of Catholic virtue, and for
over three hundred years protected them against the passage of time. It
was essentially a successful attempt to arrest change. It admonished about
the futility of trying to improve things; all change is for the worst; we
already know how to live a good life; we know what must be done to
enter Heaven; this is a time of passage during which change avails noth–
ing; the organicity of the body social is inimical to social mobility; one
can be born a peasant, lead a dreary, austere, and pious existence, and
gain eternal life, or be born a prince, live sinfully and achieve damnation.
The English Industrial Revolution has encouraged precisely the op–
posite tendencies; it has thrived on continuing change and made the re–
lentless process of transformation a condition
sine qua non
of survival in
the vanguard of its new world. Once industrialism takes hold, it is im–
possible to avoid continuing transformation; those who try are doomed
to fail as dismally as Faust, Peter Pan, and Dorian Gray. The classical so–
ciologists - and Peter Berger - have reminded us from time
to
time that
modernity is to be surrounded by people one does not know, who are
either moving up or down, or sideways. In the traditional village every–
one knew everyone else; gossip was robust and full of meaning, because
it was about people one knew very well. In modernity it has been re–
placed by plastic gossip, which is about people one does not know and
is unlikely ever to meet. Those in supermarket queues probably know
much more about the private life of Princess Diana or Mr. Trump than
about their next-door neighbors.
It
is obvious that social mobility is attended by much that is
unattractive, and this probably offers a strong encouragement to those
who - like the Holy Father - wish to offer a communitarian response,
perhaps even inspired in the ideas ofJaime Balmes, to the social travail of
modern industrialism. Yet in the past such attempts have amounted to
little more than trying to retain the benefits of industrialization without
