Repost: G.K. Chesterton – The Evolution of Emma

[502] Among the many good critical tributes to the genius of Jane Austen, to the fine distinction of her humor, the sympathetic intimacy of her satire, the easy exactitude of her unpretentious style, which have appeared in celebration of her centenary, there is one criticism that is naturally recurrent; the remark that she was quite untouched by the towering politics of her time. This is intrinsically true; nevertheless it may easily be used to imply the reverse of the truth. It is true that Jane Austen did not attempt to teach any history or politics; but it is not true that we cannot learn any history or politics from Jane Austen. Any work so piercingly intelligent of its own kind, and especially any work of so wise and humane a kind, is sure to tell us much more than shallower studies covering a larger surface. I will not say much of the mere formality of some of the conventions and conversational forms; for in such things it is not only not certain that change is important, but it is not even certain that it is final. The view that a thing is old-fashioned is itself a fashion; and may soon be an old fashion. We have seen this in many recurrences of female dress; but it has a deeper basis in human nature. The truth is that a phrase can be falsified by use without being false in fact; it can seem stale without being really stilted. Those who see a word as merely worn out, fail to look forward as well as back. I know of two poems by two Irish poets of two different centuries, essentially on the same theme; the lover declaring that his love will outlast the mere popularity of the beauty. One is by Mr. Yeats and begins: "Though you are in [503] your shining days." The other is by Tom Moore and begins: "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." The latter language strikes us as ridiculously florid and over-ripe; but Moore was far from being ridiculous. Believe me (as he would say) it was no poetaster who wrote those hackneyed words about the silent harp and the heart that breaks for liberty. And if English were read some day by strangers as a classic language, I am not sure that "endearing" would not endure as a better word than "shining"; or even that (after some repetition and reaction) it might not seem as strained to say "shining" as to say "shiny." Yet Mr. Yeats also is a great poet. Similarly, when one of Jane Austen's heroines wants to say that the hero is a good fellow, she expresses confidence in what she calls "his worth." This goads her younger modern readers to madness; yet in truth the term is far more philosophic and eternal than the terms they would use themselves. They would probably say he was "nice," and Jane Austen would indeed be avenged. For the best of her heroes, Henry Tilney, himself foresaw and fulminated against the unmeaning ubiquity of that word, a prophet of the pure reason of his age, seeing in a vision of the future the fall of the human mind.

Negatively, of course, the historic lesson from Jane Austen is enormous. She is perhaps most typical of her time in being supremely irreligious. Her very virtues glitter with the cold sunlight of the great secular epoch between mediaeval and modern mysticism. In that small masterpiece, "Northanger Abbey," her unconsciousness of history is itself a piece of history. For Catherine Morland was right, as young and romantic people often are. A real crime had been committed in Northanger Abbey. It is implied in the very name of Northanger Abbey. It was the crucial crime of the sixteenth century, when all the institutions of the poor were savagely seized to be the private possessions of the rich. It is strange that the name remains; it is stranger still that it remains unrealized. We should think it odd to go to tea at a man's house and find it was still called a church. We should be surprised if a gentleman's shooting box at Claybury were referred to as Claybury Cathedral. But the irony of the eighteenth century is that Catherine was healthily interested in crimes and yet never found the real crime; and that she never really thought of it as an abbey, even when she thought of it most as an antiquity.

But there is a positive as well as a negative way in which her greatness, like Shakespeare's, illuminates history and politics, because it illuminates everything. She understood every intricacy of the upper middle class and the minor gentry, which were to make so much of the mental life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is said that she ignored the poor and disregarded their opinions. She did, but not more than all our Governments and all our Acts of Parliaments have done. And at least she did consistently ignore them; she ignored where she was ignorant. Well it would have been for the world if others had ignored the working-class until they understood it as well as she did the middle class. She was not a student of sociology; she did not study the poor. But she did study the students—or at least the social types which were to become the students of the poor. She knew her own class, and knew it without illusions; and there is much light on later problems to be found in her delicate delineation of vanities and snobberies and patronage. She had to do with the human heart; and it is that which cometh out of the heart that defileth a nation, philanthropy, [504] efficiency, organization, social reform. And if the weaker brethren still wonder why we should find in Baby Week or Welfare Work a dangerous spirit, from which its best adherents find it hard to free themselves, if they doubt how such a danger can be reconciled with the personal delicacy and idealism of many of the women who work such things, if they think that fine words or even fine feelings will guarantee a respect for the personality of the poor, I really do not know that they could do better than sit down, I trust not for the first time, to the reading of "Emma."

For all this that has happened since might well be called the Evolution of Emma. That unique and formidable institution, the English Lady, has, indeed, become much more of a public institution; that is, she has made the same mistakes on a much larger scale. The softer fastidiousness and finer pride of the more gracious eighteenth century heroine may seem to make her a shadow by comparison. It seems cruel to say that the breaking off of Harriet's humbler engagement foreshadows the indiscriminate development of Divorce for the Poor. It seems horrible to say that Emma's small matchmaking has in it the seed of the pestilence of Eugenics. But it is true. With a gentleness and justice and sympathy with good intentions, which clear her from the charge of common cynicism, the great novelist does find the spring of her heroine's errors, and of many of ours. That spring is a philanthropy, and even a generosity, secretly founded on gentility. Emma Woodhouse was a wit, she was a good woman, she was an individual with a right to her own opinion; but it was because she was a lady that she acted as she did, and thought she had a right to act as she did. She is the type in fiction of a whole race of English ladies, in fact, for whom refinement is religion. Her claim to oversee and order the social things about her consisted in being refined; she would not have admitted that being rich had anything to do with it; but as a fact it had everything to do with it. If she had been very much richer, if she had had one of the great modern fortunes, if she had had the wider modern opportunities (for the rich) she would have thought it her duty to act on the wider modern scale; she would have had public spirit and political grasp. She would have dealt with a thousand Robert Martins and a thousand Harriet Smiths, and made the same muddle about all of them. That is what we mean about things like Baby Week—and if there had been a baby in the story, Miss Woodhouse would certainly have seen all its educational needs with a brilliant clearness. And we do not mean that the work is done entirely by Mrs. Pardiggle; we mean that much of it is done by Miss Woodhouse. But it is done because she is Miss Woodhouse and not Martha Muggins or Jemima Jones; because the Lady Bountiful is a lady first, and will bestow every bounty but freedom.

It is noted that there are few traces of the French Revolution in Miss Austen's novels; but, indeed, there have been few traces of it in Miss Austen's country. The peculiarity which has produced the situation I describe is really this: that the new sentiment of humanitarianism has come, when the old sentiment of aristocracy has not gone. Social superiors have not really lost any old privileges; they have gained new privileges, including that of being superior in philosophy and philanthropy as well as in riches and refinement. No revolution has shaken their secret security or menaced them with the awful peril of becoming no more than men. Therefore their social reform is but their social refinement [505] grown restless. And in this old tea cup comedy can be found, far more clearly appreciated than in more ambitious books about problems and politics, the psychology of this mere restlessness in the rich, when it first stirred upon its cushions. Jane Austen described a narrow class, but so truthfully that she has much to teach about its after adventures, when it remained narrow as a class and broadened only as a sect.

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Source: G.K. Chesterton, "The Evolution of Emma," The Living Age 194 (August 1917): 502–505.

Michael Crichton on Failed Environmental Predictions

Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say hallelujah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.

Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.

With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets.

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Source: Michael Crichton, "Remarks to the Commonwealth Club" (presentation, San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003).

Michael Crichton on the Religion of Environmentalism

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

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Source: Michael Crichton, "Remarks to the Commonwealth Club" (presentation, San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003).

The Difference between Fine Art and Propaganda

If the artist is to help us contemplate, he must not only show us an object by a clear imitation, but he must also dispose us to gaze at it by arousing our interests and winning our sympathy. Works of fine art usually have some element of surprise, of the puzzling, of the dazzling, or of the fascinating, that wins our attention. We might say, therefore, that the work of fine art is an imitation arousing emotional sympathy, or something of that sort.

But again this does not seem sufficiently precise. What we have just described sounds like an advertisement or a piece of propaganda which is persuasive just because it arouses our interest, appeals to our feelings, and then conveys its message. A work of fine art is, indeed, very close to advertising, and yet it is utterly different. The difference is that the advertisement wins our attention and conveys its message in order to get us to do something, to buy the product. A work of fine art, on the other hand, wins our attention in order that we might repose in contemplating its beauty, desiring for the time to do nothing else.

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Source: Fr. Benedict M. Ashley, The Arts of Learning and Communication: A Handbook of the Liberal Arts (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 278.

Archbishop Francisco Javier Martinez on Secular Society and Its Monsters

The secular society lives in daily violence, violence with reality. This violence shows that nihilism cannot and does not correspond to our being. But it shows also, in a very concrete way, how the secular society annihilates itself by engendering the very monsters that terrify it most and that it itself hates most: the twin monsters of fundamentalism and terrorism.

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Source: Francisco Javier Martinez, "Beyond Secular Reason," Communio 31/4 (Winter 2004), accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.secondspring.co.uk/articles/martinez.htm.

Edmund Waldstein on the Egalitarian Interpretation of Active Participation

The principle of active participation, which the Second Vatican Council was so right to insist on, has been nearly everywhere misunderstood and misapplied. This is because in modern democracy participation in the political order is understood in terms of being one of the rulers. We see this understanding of participation taken over so that active participation in the life of the Parish or Diocese is understood as participation in “pastoral councils” and similar tom-foolery. In the Sacred Liturgy active participation is taken to mandate all kinds of laypeople messing around in the sanctuary as lectors, ‘introducers,’ extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, etc. This banal caricature of true active participation and the priesthood of the faithful persists despite all efforts of the Magisterium to correct it. The problem is that when political government ceases to be what it should be the “wonderful resemblance” that it bears to God’s government, of which Pope Leo XIII speaks, is destroyed. But grace builds on nature and men ought to be disposed to the higher by the lower.

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Source: Thomas P. Waldstein, "Unity, Order, and Peace: On the Superiority of Traditional Hereditary Monarchy over Modern Liberal Democracy" (bachelor's thesis, Thomas Aquinas College, 2006), 36.

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Comment: Hence we see that our political-social context can sometimes unconsciously color our philosophical and theological conceptions. A hierarchical society would preserve a proper sense of active participation; an egalitarian society would corrupt it.

Berkeley the Bubble: Racism and Voter ID Laws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odB1wWPqSlE

Repost: "Saving the 'Benedict Option' from Culture War Conservatism"

[...] There is a sense among many conservatives that the Benedict Option is really just a more sophisticated “I’m moving to Canada” lament by those who lost the Culture War. But is this white-flag-waving, defeat-and-retreat “Benedict Option” the same vision we find in the final pages of After Virtue? Or is it—as several interlocutors at Dreher’s blog have begun questioning—a repeat of the “take to the woods” strategy of American Protestant fundamentalism in the early 20th century?

There’s good reason to believe that the popularized Benedict Option diverges from MacIntyre’s understanding in several crucial ways. Take, for instance, the basic timeline. MacIntyre sees our condition as the result of many centuries of development in moral and political thought, while those advocating the popular version pinpoint the origins of the decline within the last decade—in the post-Bush American political landscape. Such a hasty adoption of this “civilizational collapse” mentality should raise several concerns, most centrally whether such culture-despairers might—given the right set of platitude-spouting political candidates in the next election cycle—find themselves drawn back to the seductive hopes of “imperium maintenance.”

A proper understanding of MacIntyre’s larger argument can save After Virtue’s Benedict Option from being reduced to conservative Culture War retreatism. While After Virtue‘s conclusion may stand out for its “Dark Ages” imagery and grim diagnosis, MacIntyre’s body of work reveals a consistent predilection for particular localized forms of shared moral life. This is often confused with contemporary conservatism or communitarianism, two traditions from which he distances himself. Understanding his vision of localized communities requires also a broader engagement with his ongoing interactions with Marxism, his criticism of contemporary communitarianism, and his more recent political thought in the 2011 volume Virtue and Politics.

Briefly stitching together this vision allows us to see that some Benedict Option advocates have diverged from MacIntyre in three crucial ways: conflating contemporary electoral gains and losses with centuries-long conditions of modern culture; endorsing a form of “conservatism liberalism” denounced by MacIntyre; and falsely creating an either/or of engagement and withdrawal efforts that misses the “radical localist” push of MacIntyre’s political project. Briefly exploring each of these points supports a clearer evaluation of how MacIntyre’s work might serve the particular needs of our current political and moral predicament.

[...] Yet neither the growth of the Christian Right nor the rise of Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal economics would do anything to offset MacIntyre’s dark assessment of the “barbarians governing us,” which he reaffirms in the two editions and the 2007 prologue published subsequently. His uninterest in either 2004 presidential candidate confirms the conflict. MacIntyre’s focus has consistently been on sustaining “practice-based communities” amidst cultural conditions that transcend court rulings, electoral cycles, and partisan gains and losses.

Secondly, MacIntyre’s Benedict Option is not a blueprint for piecing together utopian societies built around the modern conservative agenda. He explicitly distances his work from the contemporary “conservative moralist” who imports his “inflated and self-righteous unironic rhetoric” to a set role established for him among the ruling liberal elite. Much of modern social conservatism envisions shoring up particular values—whether personal, patriotic, or sacred—through means of the modern liberal state, displaying a confidence in the modern state not shared by MacIntyre.

What popular Benedict Option accounts also leave out is MacIntyre’s critical view of certain economic configurations in advanced capitalism that are equally culpable for producing our current moral condition. Though MacIntyre left behind organized Marxism over fifty years ago, his work still takes seriously the interrelationship between economic systems and flourishing moral culture. Modern conservatism often fails to connect the two. Contemporary Benedict Option advocates could recover this interrelationship by turning to the careful empirical work of several sociologists attuned to the moral consequences of neoliberal capitalism: thinkers such as Richard Sennett, William Julius Wilson, and even Christian Smith’s wider contextualization of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, a frequent subject of Dreher’s work. Such work reinserts into this discussion an examination of economic configurations compatible and incompatible with the pursuit of particular forms of flourishing.

Finally, MacIntyre’s wider work envisions thick moral communities that are as revolutionary as they are retreatist, and that encompass both inward-facing and outward-facing virtues and practices. In Dependent Rational Animals MacIntyre develops from Aquinas the virtue of just generosity, a form of solidarity that extends to those with needs outside one’s immediate community. This openness to and concern for the outsider reflects the practices of Benedictine monasteries themselves.

[...] Such activities work within the niches and cracks of existing structures to build alternative practices and social relations that resist dominant cultural norms—what Erik Olin Wright labels “interstitial” strategies of transformation.

[...] Both MacIntyre and Wright argue that such efforts—in forming people’s imaginations counter to the dominant culture while still spatially located within it—can lay necessary groundwork for wider social transformation.

We are at a time when a growing number of observers have recognized the prevailing political structures are unable to produce particular moral results, whether greater economic justice, a non-racialized policing and justice system, decisive environmental policy, or the preservation of privacy rights. MacIntyre’s work, saved from a retreatist Culture War conservatism, can speak to a variety of efforts and traditions that seek ends of justice and flourishing that counter the dominant social order. [...]

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Source: Andrew Lynn, "Saving the 'Benedict Option' from Culture War Conservatism," Ethika Politika blog, June 4, 2015, accessed June 12, 2015, http://ethikapolitika.org/2015/06/04/saving-the-benedict-option-from-culture-war-conservatism/.

Repost: "Dogmatism Rightly Understood"

[...] Lewis’s elegant critique of the consequences of what we’ve come to call, somewhat oversimply, “relativism” culminates in this ringing sentence:

“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not a tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”

One the surface this statement might seem contradictory, if not in a sense shocking.  Why dogmatic?  If moral truths have an objective basis in reason (that is, natural law), why any need for dogmatism?
To give an answer to that question, let’s turn for a moment to a similar “dogmatic” declaration from the canon: Leo Strauss’s remark in his essay “Liberal Education and Responsibility” that “wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism.”  So it’s loyalty oaths and dogmatism?

Explaining the reasons why these two seemingly shocking statements are not shocking at all but highly necessary in our time could require a whole book (or a semester in the classroom), though a short version might be found, oddly enough, in an unlikely place: Federalist Paper #31, which is ostensibly just about the taxing power.  But Number 31 begins with a long preface of moral philosophy that boils down to this central point: the objective basis of moral truth is like proofs in geometry: they are grasped intuitively by “antecedent evidence” in Hamilton’s words, and if someone “doesn’t get it,” no amount of rational argument can establish the existence of moral truths.  “Where it produces not this effect,” Hamilton writes, “it must proceed either from some defect or disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, passion, or prejudice.” Today the “strong interest, passion, and prejudice” of the liberal mind is the unlimited autonomy or will of the Self, which cannot abide any constraint rooted in human nature. It is but a step from this unarticulated premise to a philosophy of unlimited government.

The trick of democratic politics, Federalist #51 explained, was enabling the government to be powerful enough to control the governed, but able to control (or limit) itself—that is, not so powerful that it threatens the natural rights of the people.  For liberals, rights today aren’t based in nature, but on will: anything you want becomes a “right” that government must secure by taxing and/or coercing your fellow citizens. It is a formula for tyranny; just ask Christian-owned bakeries right now. This is why Lewis says belief in objective value is necessary; the need for it to be “dogmatic” arises from the corruption of the liberal mind that more and more often today rejects reason and objectivity tout court. Against this highly trained incapacity to think, dogmatism is necessary, lest civilization itself slip inexorably away beneath the waves of nihilism.

Likewise in the second half of Lewis’s sentence, the idea of objective value is the only basis on which to answer the first question of political obligation: why should you obey the law? Post-modern liberals cannot answer the “why” of this question, and openly say that law is based only on force. Most of the time I am tempted to respond by saying: “Fine—how many of you are members of the NRA?” That’s how I let my dogma run over their (smart)-karma.

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Source: Steven Hayward, "Dogmatism Rightly Understood," Powerline blog, May 1, 2015, accessed May 30, 2015, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/dogmatism-rightly-understood.php.

Pope Benedict XV, Traditionalist Divisions, and Neo-Catholics

22. The success of every society of men, for whatever purpose it is formed, is bound up with the harmony of the members in the interests of the common cause. Hence We must devote Our earnest endeavors to appease dissension and strife, of whatever character, amongst Catholics, and to prevent new dissensions arising, so that there may be unity of ideas and of action amongst all. The enemies of God and of the Church are perfectly well aware that any internal quarrel amongst Catholics is a real victory for them. Hence it is their usual practice when they see Catholics strongly united, to endeavor by cleverly sowing the seeds of discord, to break up that union. And would that the result had not frequently justified their hopes, to the great detriment of the interests of religion! Hence, therefore, whenever legitimate authority has once given a clear command, let no one transgress that command, because it does not happen to commend itself to him; but let each one subject his own opinion to the authority of him who is his superior, and obey him as a matter of conscience. Again, let no private individual, whether in books or in the press, or in public speeches, take upon himself the position of an authoritative teacher in the Church. All know to whom the teaching authority of the Church has been given by God: he, then, possesses a perfect right to speak as he wishes and when he thinks it opportune. The duty of others is to hearken to him reverently when he speaks and to carry out what he says.

23. As regards matters in which without harm to faith or discipline—in the absence of any authoritative intervention of the Apostolic See—there is room for divergent opinions, it is clearly the right of everyone to express and defend his own opinion. But in such discussions no expressions should be used which might constitute serious breaches of charity; let each one freely defend his own opinion, but let it be done with due moderation, so that no one should consider himself entitled to affix on those who merely do not agree with his ideas the stigma of disloyalty to faith or to discipline.

24. It is, moreover, Our will that Catholics should abstain from certain appellations which have recently been brought into use to distinguish one group of Catholics from another. They are to be avoided not only as "profane novelties of words," out of harmony with both truth and justice, but also because they give rise to great trouble and confusion among Catholics. Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected: "This is the Catholic faith, which unless a man believe faithfully and firmly; he cannot be saved" (Athanas. Creed). There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim "Christian is my name and Catholic my surname," only let him endeavor to be in reality what he calls himself.

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Source: Pope Benedict XV, "Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum ('Appealing for Peace')," Papal Encyclical, promulgated November 1, 1914, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Ben15/b15adbea.htm.

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If only Catholics realized the truth of this Holy Father's words and lived them, perhaps so much good would be done in the conversion of souls to the full embracing of the Faith and the recognition of the importance of Sacred Tradition. My own gradual embracing of Tradition in its greater totality and integrity was gradual precisely because of my perception that I wasn't so much being evangelized as so uncomfortably pinned, like the speaker in T.S. Eliot's poem The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume? (ln. 55–61)

In other words, I had no sense that self-identified traditionalists were interacting with me out of any actual consideration for my salvation and sanctification, but instead I became a competitor in a most bizarre ideological game. It is growing parlance among (Internet) traditionalists to label quasi-traditionalists as "Neo-Catholics" or "Neo-Conservatives" (cf. Peter Miller, "A Brief Defense of Traditionalism," Seattle Catholic, December 21, 2001, http://www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20011221_A_Brief_Defense_of_Traditionalism.html; Fr. Chad Ripperger, FSSP, "Conservative vs. Traditional Catholicism," Latin Mass (Spring 2001), http://www.latinmassmagazine.com/articles/articles_2001_SP_Ripperger.html; Hilary White, "Revenge of the Neo-Cats," The Remnant Newspaper, November 23, 2011, http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2011-115-white-hilary-neo-cats.htm). In fact, it actually turns out that Neo-Conservative Catholics (Neo-Catholics) are actually liberal Catholics who essentially go through a subconscious intellectual battle to reconcile their dual adherence to traditionalism and modernism (especially Hegelianism, according to Fr. Ripperger). I will note off the bat that some of these treatments, such as Fr. Ripperger's, are quite considerate and thoughtful; a problematic enters in because of the easy association with a general sociological trend that as a whole seems uncharitable.

Why is this an issue for me? Because I've been hurt by their use, and I've been hurt by the division I see these identities cause, and I've seen others hurt by them as well. I've seen how they tend to foster a multitude of sins and environments of sin—occasions of calumny, mockery, indifference, group-thinking, close-mindedness, and pride. I am responding from a place of pain and a desire to make sense of my experiences, perceptions, and what this phenomenon itself reveals in its "observable" aspect, the tendencies and "taxonomic features."

As I said above, as far as sociological function goes, the term may be useful, but as is the tendency with all labels, their use can easily become obviously uncharitable and detrimental to the one promoting its use. Aside from a very brief perusal of online discussions that incorporate these labels, a glance at White's article makes the point clearly enough. Underneath her humorous pretense, the tone and overall effect transmitted by her description of the Neo-Catholic is strikingly condescending, showing no consideration for the wellbeing of the very people she describes, her own brothers and sisters in Christ. This lack of consideration is evinced through certain flippant phrases and hyperbolic descriptions that give the impression that one ought to look at a "Neo-Cat" like he were a clown or a zoo animal (I've bolded lines that particularly stand out in illustrating this tone):

• Neo-Catholics themselves frequently become angry when it is pointed out that it is an observable fact that there are certain taxonomic features that create an identifiable classification to which a distinguishing term, "neo-Catholic" can usefully be applied. They become doubly angry when they realize that it can usefully be applied to them. (Hours of fun can be had at the after-Mass tea ticking these characteristics off one's fingers.) [...]
• Common characteristics of neo-Catholics (often also called neo-conservative Catholics) are a fanatical devotion to a small selection of popes, often incorrectly termed "ultramontanism." This is manifested mainly in their belief that John Paul II was the greatest pope of modern times (who probably walked on water but was too modest to do it in front of anyone) and should be canonized immediately. [...]
• They will then proceed to bore everyone in the room into a coma by reciting their lists of places where [a reverent celebration of the Novus Ordo Mass] is done. [...]
• (Get them started on the Catholic Confessional State as a political concept and watch their heads explode. In fact, start a conversation on the Social Reign of Christ the King at the tea and cookies after a Traditional Mass. It flushes them out; they start screeching like vampires splashed with holy water, to the amusement of all.) [...]
• They are very big on ecumenism, and love to screech at the Trads for our opposition to the Assisi fiascoes [....]
• They will sometimes be opposed to drinking, smoking and card-playing, one of the little ways in which their underlying protestantism peeks out. This can make it easy to quickly distinguish the Neos and the Trads at a party. The former will be standing around in a little clutch cradling a warm, three-hour-old beer, earnestly discussing the pope's latest encyclical or some political thing. The latter will be off in the corner with the recently assimilated Anglicans, balancing martini glasses on their noses while reciting Greek poetry. [...]
• Despite the objections of the Neo-Cats themselves, the phenomenon has become so recognizable that it has its very own whole Wikipedia page [since removed] which, as we know, is the sine qua non of objective affirmation. It ain't really real unless it's on Wiki.

Perhaps people get upset when they are identified with "certain taxonomic features" because the impression they receive from the ones labeling them that seems to possess no benevolent intent or constructive purpose. White never describes how the term is actually useful. We may admit it is sociologically useful under certain circumstances, but if mere factual features are being described, why should this lead to anger on the part of the one described? (Further, why should there be hyperbole and jeering even if under the pretense of humor?) Anger is a response to hurt. Hurt is a response to a perceived evil. Perhaps when another person misconstrues your views, you feel hurt by the caricature. Perhaps when another person forms a caricature of you or your beliefs and gives no sign of friendship, mutual concern, support, consideration, this action is then hurtful. I don't think this requires any stretch of empathy at all to realize how and why a person might become angry.

The hyperbole doesn't need to be addressed. It forms the caricature, and as hyperbole, it cannot claim any sort of accuracy, much less the apparently scientific-esque status of "observable fact" or "certain taxonomic features," which are just fancy ways to legitimize a value assignment on someone, based not on certain faith but matters of legitimately varying opinion, which based on my experience is usually an exercise of intellectual pride. Recall what Bl. John Henry Newman said in Sermon 10 of his Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1849), "Faith and Private Judgment":

Men were told to submit their reason to a living authority. Moreover, whatever an Apostle said, his converts were bound to believe; when they entered the Church, they entered it in order to learn. The Church was their teacher; they did not come to argue, to examine, to pick and choose, but to accept whatever was put before them. No one doubts, no one can doubt this, of those primitive times. A Christian was bound to take without doubting all that the Apostles declared to be revealed; if the Apostles spoke, he had to yield an internal assent of his mind; it would not be enough to keep silence, it would not be enough not to oppose: it was not allowable to credit in a measure; it was not allowable to doubt. No; if a convert had his own private thoughts of what was said, and only kept them to himself, if he made some secret opposition to the teaching, if he waited for further proof before he believed it, this would be a proof that he did not think the Apostles were sent from God to reveal His will; it would be a proof that he did not in any true sense believe at all. Immediate, implicit submission of the mind was, in the lifetime of the Apostles, the only, the necessary token of faith; then there was no room whatever for what is now called private judgment. No one could say: "I will choose my religion for myself, I will believe this, I will not believe that; I will pledge myself to nothing; I will believe just as long as I please, and no longer; what I believe today I will reject tomorrow, if I choose. I will believe what the Apostles have as yet said, but I will not believe what they shall say in time to come." No; either the Apostles were from God, or they were not; if they were, everything that they preached was to be believed by their hearers; if they were not, there was nothing for their hearers to believe. To believe a little, to believe more or less, was impossible; it contradicted the very notion of believing: if one part was to be believed, every part was to be believed; it was an absurdity to believe one thing and not another; for the word of the Apostles, which made the one true, made the other true too; they were nothing in themselves, they were all things, they were an infallible authority, as coming from God. The world had either to become Christian, or to let it alone; there was no room for private tastes and fancies, no room for private judgment. (Source: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse10.html)

Likening Neo-Catholics to "vampires" screeching "to the amusement of all" as well as spending "hours of fun [...] ticking these [taxonomic] characteristics off" further reveals the condescending tone as well as total indifference to their wellbeing. How are such exercises themselves spiritual or charitable in any way? How do they contribute to holiness, to the preparation of souls for the coming of Christ and His Reign? Do they not encourage and harden division? Isn't division one of Satan's most powerful weapons against followers of Christ? A house divided cannot stand...

St. John Chrysostom warns us about being careless with our words and comments on Christ's admonition not to call each other "fool" (Homily 16 on Matthew; http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF1-10/npnf1-10-22.htm):

Knowest thou not that most punishments and most sins have their beginning from words? Yea, for by words are blasphemies, and denials are by words, and revilings, and reproaches, and perjuries, and bearing false witness. Regard not then its being a mere word, but whether it have not much danger, this do thou inquire. Art thou ignorant that in the season of enmity, when wrath is inflamed, and the soul kindled, even the least thing appears great, and what is not very reproachful is counted intolerable? [...] 

For there is nothing, nothing in the world more intolerable than insolence; it is what hath very great power to sting a man's soul. But when the word too which is spoken is in itself more wounding than the insolence, the blaze becomes twice as great. Think it not then a light thing to call another "fool." For when of that which separates us from the brutes, and by which especially we are human beings, namely, the mind and the understanding,-when of this thou hast robbed thy brother, thou hast deprived him of all his nobleness. 

Let us not then regard the words merely, but realizing the things themselves, and his feeling, let us consider how great a wound is made by this word, and unto how much evil it proceeds. For this cause Paul likewise cast out of the kingdom not only "the adulterous" and "the effeminate," but "the revilers" also. And with great reason: for the insolent man mars all the beauty of charity, and casts upon his neighbor unnumbered ills, and works up lasting enmities, and tears asunder the members of Christ, and is daily driving away that peace which God so desires: giving much vantage ground unto the devil by his injurious ways, and making him the stronger. Therefore Christ Himself, cutting out the sinews of the devil's power, brought in this law. 

For indeed He makes much account of love: this being above all things the mother of every good, and the badge of His disciples, and the bond which holds together our whole condition. With reason therefore doth He remove with great earnestness the roots and the sources of that hatred which utterly spoils it. 

Think not therefore that these sayings are in any wise hyperbolical, but consider the good done by them, and admire the mildness of these laws. For there is nothing for which God takes so much pains, as this; that we should be united and knit together one with another. Therefore both in His own person, and by His disciples, as well those in the Old, as in the New Testament, He makes so much account of this commandment; and is a severe avenger and punisher of those who despise the duty. For in truth nothing so effectually gives entrance and root to all wickedness, as the taking away of love.

Finally, the description about the party is problematic precisely because of its hyperbole. The latter situation of the "real Trads" and converted Anglicans clearly describes people who are drunk or at least have gone beyond reasonable modesty and decorum. Drunkenness (nor modesty and decorum for that matter) isn't a post-Protestant, post-Victorian sin against political correctness or comfortable, liberal sentiments. Smoking, drinking, and card-playing should not be treated as though for the majority of participants there were no danger in these activities; no, for the majority of those who drink, smoke, or play cards and other forms of competition, I suggest that these activities provide numerous occasions of sin if not deep-rooted addiction and societal structures of sin enforced by capitalist economies. These activities are not intrinsically sinful—I think very few Catholics of any sense would actually argue this point, but on the other hand to present these activities without proper caution seems arrogant, blind, and a sure way to fall into Satan's traps to ensnare us in sin. In other words, the whole situation is another caricature that confuses the suggestion that these activities are probably dangerous for many, above all considering the average lack of self-reflection and discernment of spirits and motives, with the notion that they are intrinsically sinful.

As for what Pope Benedict XV said, I think here is the authoritative say on the (il-)legitimacy of calling oneself a "Traditionalist"; it is useful sociologically (and hence, perhaps, apologetically), useful as the distinction between a Coca-Cola drinker and a Pepsi drinker among soda drinkers (because, after all, there are traditionalists, and then there are traditionalists, not to mention traditionalists). But what good will that label do to keep one out of Hell and to attain holiness and enter Heaven? St. Paul replies: 

If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:1–2, DR trans.)

We may here now understand one possible extension of "tongues of men," namely, our ability to construct our own identities and to project them. What good do I do myself or others if I call myself faithful and I am not faithful, charitable and am not charitable? Adherence to Tradition is adherence to Christ; adherence to Christ is not just intellectual belief but the Cross:

Then Jesus said to his disciples: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it. For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul? (Mt. 16:24–26; cf. Lk. 9:23–26)

Someone must be sent to preach. What do they preach? Christ Crucified, "Unto the Jews indeed a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness" (1 Cor. 1:13). And the end of the Cross is our sanctification, and the end of our sanctification is the glory of God. The only thing we must ask ourselves is not, "Am I a Traditionalist or a Neo-Catholic?" but "Am I doing all I can to know the will of God and to do it?" Only the one who hears Christ's words and does them will have built his house on solid rock and be saved.

Repost: Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Only Vote Worth Casting in November"

When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives. These are propositions which in the abstract may seem to invite easy agreement. But, when they find application to the coming presidential election, they are likely to be rejected out of hand. For it has become an ingrained piece of received wisdom that voting is one mark of a good citizen, not voting a sign of irresponsibility. But the only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target.

Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.

The basic economic injustice of our society is that the costs of economic growth are generally borne by those least able to afford them and that the majority of the benefits of economic growth go to those who need them least. Compare the rise in wages of ordinary working people over the last thirty years to the rise in the incomes and wealth of the top twenty percent. Compare the value of minimum wage now to its value then and next compare the value of the remuneration of CEOs to its value then. What is needed to secure family life is a sufficient minimum income for every family and that can perhaps best be secured by some version of the negative income tax, proposed long ago by Milton Friedman, a tax that could be used to secure a large and just redistribution of income and so of property.

We note at this point that we have already broken with both parties and both candidates. Try to promote the pro-life case that we have described within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down. Try to advance the case for economic justice as we have described it within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court. Above all, insist, as we are doing, that these two cases are inseparable, that each requires the other as its complement, and you will be met with blank incomprehension. For the recognition of this is precluded by the ideological assumptions in terms of which the political alternatives are framed. Yet at the same time neither party is wholeheartedly committed to the cause of which it is the ostensible defender. Republicans happily endorse pro-choice candidates, when it is to their advantage to do so. Democrats draw back from the demands of economic justice with alacrity, when it is to their advantage to do so. And in both cases rhetorical exaggeration disguises what is lacking in political commitment.

In this situation a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is also a vote cast for a system that presents us only with unacceptable alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.

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Source: Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Only Vote Worth Casting in November," University of Notre Dame, October 2004, http://brandon.multics.org/library/Alasdair%20MacIntyre/macintyre2004vote.html.

Repost: The Link between Politics and Religion in Pre-Modern Christian Communities

In Christian societies of the past, rulers recognized one or another form of Christianity as true in their capacity as representatives of the public reason. A community, if it is to be a community at all, must have some shared values and final commitments, which will always be in some sense theological and mythological, and it only makes sense that the political organization of the community will act on and defend these values and commitments. [... This] is still true today, but we now believe in liberalism and individual autonomy rather than Christianity. With all of this in mind, I think we need to understand that a heresy like, say, Catharism was not simply a matter of private opinion, but was instead a real challenge to the legitimacy of both the religious and political structures of the community and would have sought to establish a new state of affairs in which its own assumptions were normative. In this situation, it is obvious that rulers have a legitimate interest in defending orthodoxy.

So, contrary to the imaginings of some [...], the past was not some age of perpetual night in which sinister inquisitors went around gleefully condemning miserable peasants to be burnt at the stake for their ignorance of some recondite point of doctrine. It is also obvious that most Christian societies in the past were not fascist, though obviously this assumes that "fascist" is being used here as anything more than a meaningless smear, and that people were not one poorly worded statement away from being burnt for heresy.

In fact, if one looks at how Catholic rulers who had to deal with significant numbers of both non-Christians and non-Catholics dealt with these issues, I think one will find many examples of a fair degree of tolerance. For instance, Muslims and Orthodox Christians were treated very well under the Norman rulers of Sicily, and even in the Frankish Levant, Catholic rulers gradually became relatively tolerant and flexible. According to the twelfth-century Syriac Patriarch of Antioch Michael the Great, "although the Franks were in accord with the Greeks concerning the duality of Christ's nature . . . they never sought a single formula for all the Christian people and languages ["Christian people and languages" is in itself a pretty interesting formulation, by the way], but they considered as Christian anyone who worshipped the cross without investigation or examination." Over time, Catholics in the Levant in some cases worshipped together with local Christians or came together with them in devotion to the same saints. Since the local Christian communities, even if heretical from a Catholic perspective, did not represent an inherent threat to the religious and political orders established by the crusaders, they were given a fair degree of toleration and in some cases could do quite well in the new order.

Anyway, all of this is simply to say that I think some [people] are improperly universalizing a thoroughly modern dichotomy of public and private spheres and that this is why they are having such a difficult time understanding Christian societies of the past without caricaturing them. When fulfilling his role properly, a Catholic ruler was not just going around having people burnt for "private" opinions, but was defending the religious and political order of the community from movements that challenged both, as the two were not clearly distinguished. Eventually, religion would, at least nominally, be neutralized as a realm of political struggle while other realms would come to the fore as arenas for conflict, but I don't really see how this represents anything like moral progress. Of course, this isn't to say that heretics in the past were always treated justly or that one must support the death penalty for heretics, which would obviously lack any real meaning in modern society, but I think we should at least try to understand why Christians in the past thought and acted in the way they did without resorting to a lazy narrative of progress.

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Source: Crusading Philologist, October 25, 2014 (09:51 p.m.), comment on Melkite, "Is It the Will of the Holy Spirit that Heretics Should Be Burned?," Fish Eaters Traditional Catholic Forum, October 22, 2014, http://www.fisheaters.com/forums/index.php?topic=3466364.0. 

Human Rights as Morally Ambivalent

Human rights strike me as morally ambivalent, i.e. they can both support and undermine the moral dimension of man. How so? Consider that the same rights can be used both to protect the autonomy of an individual while also entrapping that individual's conscience to the requirements of the state. Or else consider that a right might protect what is owed by justice as well as what is harmful to human flourishing; it might protect the necessities of life while at the same time creating the space in which individuals no longer have to consider each others' existence. "We can and will do as we please so long as we don't get in each other's ways."

I don't see anything intrinsic to the notion of a right that suggests protection of what is morally good. It may have been used as such and in such a narrative—we uphold the rights of humans in order to protect their good, but the narrative depends on a notion of the good that may not be shared, that may arise from a consideration of ideology rather than reason or nature. Couldn't rights conceivably be used to protect something evil?

Finally, what happens to the status of man as a moral individual when the state takes away or replaces his rights? Or rather, what is revealed about the condition of man under the state when the state removes these rights by diktat. If the state no longer says that man has rights, and rights are political principles upheld by a state, would not man as citizen be reduced to a slave? But if the state can already do this act, doesn't that mean man is already a slave of the state but likes to go on pretending otherwise simply because his "rights" remain present by decree of the state?

Should not morality rather be grounded in nature itself then rather than a political construct? This issue also raises the question of how humans existed as moral and political beings before the concept of rights existed.

Repost: Karl Marx on How Human Rights Force Competition

But, if a man, although a Jew, can be emancipated politically and receive civic rights, can he lay claim to the so-called rights of man and receive them? Bauer denies it.

“The question is whether the Jew as such, that is, the Jew who himself admits that he is compelled by his true nature to live permanently in separation from other men, is capable of receiving the universal rights of man and of conceding them to others.” 

“For the Christian world, the idea of the rights of man was only discovered in the last century. It is not innate in men; on the contrary, it is gained only in a struggle against the historical traditions in which hitherto man was brought up. Thus the rights of man are not a gift of nature, not a legacy from past history, but the reward of the struggle against the accident of birth and against the privileges which up to now have been handed down by history from generation to generation. These rights are the result of culture, and only one who has earned and deserved them can possess them.” 

“Can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews. He declares by this separation that the particular nature which makes him a Jew is his true, highest nature, before which human nature has to give way.” 

“Similarly, the Christian as a Christian cannot grant the rights of man.” (p. 19-20)

According to Bauer, man has to sacrifice the “privilege of faith” to be able to receive the universal rights of man. Let us examine, for a moment, the so-called rights of man – to be precise, the rights of man in their authentic form, in the form which they have among those who discovered them, the North Americans and the French. These rights of man are, in part, political rights, rights which can only be exercised in community with others. Their content is participation in the community, and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state. They come within the category of political freedom, the category of civic rights, which, as we have seen, in no way presuppose the incontrovertible and positive abolition of religion – nor, therefore, of Judaism. There remains to be examined the other part of the rights of man – the droits d’homme, insofar as these differ from the droits d’citoyen.

Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to practice any religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized either as a right of man or as the consequence of a right of man, that of liberty.

Déclaration des droits de l’droits et du citoyen, 1791, Article 10: “No one is to be subjected to annoyance because of his opinions, even religious opinions.” “The freedom of every man to practice the religion of which he is an adherent.” 

Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among the rights of man, Article 7: “The free exercise of religion.” Indeed, in regard to man’s right to express his thoughts and opinions, to hold meetings, and to exercise his religion, it is even stated: “The necessity of proclaiming these rights presupposes either the existence or the recent memory of despotism.” Compare the Constitution of 1795, Section XIV, Article 354. 

Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, § 3: “All men have received from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and no one can be legally compelled to follow, establish, or support against his will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in any circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control the forces of the soul.” 

Constitution of New Hampshire, Article 5 and 6: “Among these natural rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing can replace them. The rights of conscience are among them.” (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 213,214)

Incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is to such a degree absent from the concept of the rights of man that, on the contrary, a man’s right to be religious, in any way he chooses, to practise [sic] his own particular religion, is expressly included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man.

The droits de l’homme, the rights of man, are, as such, distinct from the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is homme as distinct from citoyen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society called “man,” simply man; why are his rights called the rights of man? How is this fact to be explained? From the relationship between the political state and civil society, from the nature of political emancipation.

Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society – i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. Let us hear what the most radical Constitution, the Constitution of 1793, has to say:

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.Article 2. “These rights, etc., (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.”

What constitutes liberty?

Article 6. “Liberty is the power which man has to do everything that does not harm the rights of others,” or, according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791: “Liberty consists in being able to do everything which does not harm others.”

Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why is the Jew, according to Bauer, incapable of acquiring the rights of man?

“As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews.”

But, the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself.

The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property.

What constitutes man’s right to private property?

Article 16. (Constitution of 1793): “The right of property is that which every citizen has of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry.”

The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré), without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it. But, above all, it proclaims the right of man

“of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry.”

There remain the other rights of man: égalité and sûreté.

Equality, used here in its non-political sense, is nothing but the equality of the liberté described above – namely: each man is to the same extent regarded as such a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1795 defines the concept of this equality, in accordance with this significance, as follows:

Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the law being the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.”

And security?

Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.”

Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel calls civil society “the state of need and reason.”

The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793) This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen, but man as private individual [bourgeois] who is considered to be the essential and true man.

“The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.” (Declaration of the Rights, etc., of 1791, Article 2) 

“Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights.” (Declaration, etc., of 1793, Article 1)

Hence, even in moments when its enthusiasm still has the freshness of youth and is intensified to an extreme degree by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be a mere means, whose purpose is the life of civil society. It is true that its revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. Whereas, for example, security is declared one of the rights of man, violation of the privacy of correspondence is openly declared to be the order of the day. Whereas “unlimited freedom of the press” (Constitution of 1793, Article 122) is guaranteed as a consequence of the right of man to individual liberty, freedom of the press is totally destroyed, because “freedom of the press should not be permitted when it endangers public liberty.” (“Robespierre jeune,” Historie parlementaire de la Révolution française by Buchez and Roux, vol.28, p. 159) That is to say, therefore: The right of man to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with its aim, with these rights of man. But, practice is merely the exception, theory is the rule. But even if one were to regard revolutionary practice as the correct presentation of the relationship, there would still remain the puzzle of why the relationship is turned upside-down in the minds of the political emancipators and the aim appears as the means, while the means appears as the aim. This optical illusion of their consciousness would still remain a puzzle, although now a psychological, a theoretical puzzle.

The puzzle is easily solved.

Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word – feudalism. The character of the old civil society was directly political – that is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labor, were raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of seigniory, estates, and corporations. In this form, they determined the relation of the individual to the state as a whole – i.e., his political relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the other components of society. For that organization of national life did not raise property or labor to the level of social elements; on the contrary, it completed their separation from the state as a whole and constituted them as discrete societies within society. Thus, the vital functions and conditions of life of civil society remained, nevertheless, political, although political in the feudal sense – that is to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation. As a result of this organization, the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people.

The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person’s distinct activity and distinct situation in life were reduced to a merely individual significance. They no longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual’s general function.

But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal content.

Feudal society was resolved into its basic element – man, but man as he really formed its basis – egoistic man.

This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis, the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man.

The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty, however, is rather the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life.

Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business.

The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – whose relation with one another on law, just as the relations of men in the system of estates and guilds depended on privilege – is accomplished by one and the same act. Man as a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however, as the natural man. The “rights of man” appears as “natural rights,” because conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. Egoistic man is the passive result of the dissolved society, a result that is simply found in existence, an object of immediate certainty, therefore a natural object.

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Source: Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," Marxists, 2008/9, accessed October 12, 2014, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/.

Repost: Ed West on the "Blank Slate" of Human Nature

Great article from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100177038/a-decade-after-steven-pinkers-the-blank-slate-why-is-human-nature-still-taboo/.

Source: Ed West, "A Decade After Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, Why is Human Nature Still Taboo?," The Telegraph, August 17, 2012, accessed September 29, 2014, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100177038/a-decade-after-steven-pinkers-the-blank-slate-why-is-human-nature-still-taboo/.

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It is hard to know whether Julian Savulescu’s suggestion that we have a “moral obligation” to engineer babies will help push the overton window towards a new and more frightening era of eugenics, or will arouse enough revulsion to make people take the threat seriously.

But one thing is for certain – it’s a good thing we live in a society where Savulescu can make such comments, and though I find the idea morally reprehensible, there is nothing reprehensible in itself in suggesting ways of tackling societal problems such as violence, nor of testing a moral taboo.

The issue of taboos is a central aspect of perhaps the most important book to be published in this still young century, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which came out ten years ago next month.

In it Pinker mentions a study that “asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs”, and which found that “not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision”.

That’s why people don’t touch taboos; yet as Pinker argued in the book, the great taboo of today is that of human nature and the blank slate is a sacred doctrine. Despite the book's impact, 10 years later the blank-slate model of human nature is still routinely discussed as fact, rather than fantasy, and continues to have serious implications for society (one of which may be that we are rushing towards the sort of projects suggested by Saveluscu).

The blank slate doctrine affects almost every area of our lives. Take, for example, recent moves in Ireland to set quotas on women in politics, a move that is moderate compared to quota systems already implemented in Scandinavia. Whether one thinks this is right or not, what is wrong is that the starting premise is a totally pseudoscientific view of human nature – gender feminism.

As Pinker wrote, there are two types of feminism: “Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.

“In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down.”

Gender feminism is no more scientific than astrology, yet the idea of total equality of outcomes is still some sort of vague official goal among the European elite, largely because “people’s unwillingness to think in statistical terms has led to pointless false dichotomies", between "women are unqualified" and "fifty-fifty absolutely".

The end result of gender feminism has been the blackening of the name feminist, which many women and men deny because they associate it with radical, unscientific ideas about “gender” being a “social construct”, ideas which are still taught as fact in British universities despite being as factual as creationism.

Then there is the false dichotomy about nature and nurture in child-raising. In education, for instance, public debate still revolves around the idea that intelligence is environmental, when all available evidence suggests that it is between 50 and 80 per cent nature. So when Chris Woodhead made the point that children from higher socio-economic backgrounds are, on average, cleverer, his views were considered outrageous.

Of course there are environmental factors that disadvantage poorer children, and these should be addressed, just as there are ways in which women can be given more choice in their careers, but that is the point of Pinker’s book – accepting human nature does not necessary mean embracing any ideology. The Harvard professor is no polemicist and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. Being a conservative, liberal or socialist are all legitimate stances, depending on what priorities one favours (stability, freedom or equality). But what is not legitimate is forcing debate to revolve around false facts.

[...]

And that is exactly how advocates of the blank slate have come to dominate the public sphere for so long, and why terrible decisions have been made by public officials, based on faulty data.

As Pinker recalls: “Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new science picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’. The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology, and scientists who examined the human mind in a biological context were now considered tools of a reactionary establishment.”

So Richard Herrnstein was called a racist for arguing, in 1971, that “since differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it will also become more stratified along genetic lines”, even though he was not even discussing race. He received death threats and his lecture halls were filled with chanting mobs.

Then there was EO Wilson, whose Sociobiology concluded that some universals, including the moral sense, may come from a human nature shaped by natural selection. The aim of the book was to describe things such as violence and altruism through evolution, yet a widely-read article by a group of academics accused him of promoting theories that “led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany”.

As Pinker says: “The accusation that Wilson (a lifelong liberal Democrat) was led by personal prejudice to defend racism, sexism, inequality, slavery and genocide was especially unfair – and irresponsible, because Wilson became a target of vilification and harassment by people who read the manifesto but not the book.”

Other controversies down the years included the unmasking of the myth of the noble savage, with scientists who found murder rates in pre-agriculture societies were astonishingly high accused of justifying genocide; and rape, which gender feminists believed was not about sex, despite clearly being about sex.

The latter has been especially tragic because of the moral imperative behind the study of rape – to reduce its occurrence. As Pinker wrote: “Any scientist who illuminates the causes of rape deserves our admiration, like a medical researcher who illuminates the cause of a disease, because understanding an affliction is the first step towards eliminating it. And since no one acquires the truth by divine revelation, we must also respect those who explore theories that may turn out to be incorrect. Moral criticism would seen to be in order only for those who would enforce dogmas, ignore evidence, or shut down research, because they would be protecting their reputations at the expense of victims of rape that might not have occurred if we understood the phenomenon better.”

That, unfortunately, is how orthodoxies are enforced across a range of subjects, despite being incredibly weak. On the idea that intelligence is entirely environment [sic], Pinker wrote that “even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity”. And yet now, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is still not considered decent to question the taboo about human nature when it comes to policy.

But just as the good name of feminism has been stigmatised by its radical wing, the whole of the social sciences have been damaged by the blank-slate orthodoxy, which has led to widespread anti-intellectualism, since the public at large come to view academia as a font of convenient untruths and agenda-driven nonsense (or to use the popular phrase, political correctness). Worst of all it has actually made it harder to help the most vulnerable, because we fail to take account of the fact that some people are less smart than others or, as Savulescu pointed out, more prone to vice or violence; and it has even made society less sympathetic to people who, because they have been less blessed by nature, lose out in the rat race.

A decade after The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo?

Repost: Andrew Clavan on Microaggression on College Campuses

This is pretty funny. It satirizes first-world problems.

Repost: Andrew Klavan on Conversation Enders

Although this video has a clear political bias, it very humorously and accurately describes a few phrases and labels used to stop rational conversation, a practice and impulse that obviously embraces people of any political background. It is human nature to return to unreflective states of being.

John Deely on "Creationism" vs. "Evolution"

[506] This is among the most enduring, baffling, and empty of the controversies of all of history, to say nothing merely of modern times, whence it continues to rage around us long past its time.

In 1945, Antonin Sertillanges, an excellent philosopher—not a great one, but a very, very good mind—wrote an entire book, The Idea of Creation, on just this question. This book should have shown everyone once and for all that this celebrated controversy is a nominalism, empty air delivered in withering blasts. For "there is nothing to prevent us from seeing in evolution, instead of a substitute for creation", which it could hardly be anyway, "simply another perspective on the manner in which the creative fact is bound up with the facts of nature" (Sertillanges 1945: 128). But not everyone read Sertillanges, and, anyway, he wrote in French, a language most proponents of "creationism" don't know.

But the doctrinal language that he spoke was pure Thomas Aquinas, from whom Sertillanges took the idea for his book. In the time of Aquinas, it was believed that the Bible taught that the world had a beginning. Aristotle taught, quite explicitly to the contrary, that the world was eternal. This, indeed, was one of the several reasons why the medieval church authorities tried to chop of Aristotle's head as soon as it appeared in Latin, by condemning his work and forbidding that it be read.

Thomas Aquinas, who clearly read Aristotle and thought for himself besides (you would have expected that, as a saint, he would have paid a little more attention to the church authorities), commented on this controversy by pointing out that the question of God's creation of the world has no least connection with the question of when the world exists but a question of how the world exists. And any system of interacting finite beings, statically or dynamically conceived, can be shown to be possible only on the assumption of an infinite being who imparts to them at each moment, and sustains them at each moment in, actual existence. The idea of creation reduced to its essential content is not the idea of a beginning in time but of a dependency in being, a dependentia in esse.

This is what Sertillanges repeated to his modern contemporaries in 1945. Creation is purely and simply a question of does God act presupposing something besides Himself, or presupposing nothing at all? That is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one. Evolution, by contrast, is a scientific, not a metaphysical, question; and still less one that can be decided by religion.

[507] There are some matters that can be decided by neither philosophy nor religion, and the question of whether the world as a matter of fact changes over time in its basic structures and specific features is one of them. If you want to know how the world changes in its physical being over time you have to go out, gather the evidence capable of revealing this, and not refuse to look at that evidence. Aristotle can tell you that if the environment on which the earth depends does not change, then neither will the earth. But Aristotle cannot tell you whether the environment on which the earth depends changes or not. For that you have to look at that environment. To babble philosophy or to quote scripture contrary to what you find in the physical evidence is inane. Said rightly Sertillanges (1945: 142):

Whoever does not see that has not grasped the essential import of the notion of creation. He has restricted and anthropomorphized the notion beyond what is permissible. Once that has been pointed out, moreover, we are free to return calmly to the biblical conception of an initial creation after or beyond which is a divine repose. 

We henceforth know well that one can conceptualize this repose in any of three forms: as sanctioning the fixity of beings in their genus and species; as giving them over to their progressive unfolding through time; or, finally, as imparting to the latent psychism with which it has endowed them the responsibility for temporal creations more and more exuberant. 

One is free to choose, awaiting further evidence. But it is to be fervently hoped that after so much vain quarreling, we Christians will cease bringing forward unjustified censures respecting this doctrine of evolution, to which, under one form or another [Deely comments: Under the second on of the three forms, as it turns out], the future seems certain to belong.

The legitimate argument of the "creationists", therefore, is not against the idea of evolution but against those particular versions of evolutionary theory propounded by persons who so misunderstand the nature of the case and so confusedly grasp the ideas they propound as to think that it is enough to show that there has been an evolution to show that there is no God. Such was the actual case of the Soviet cosmonaut who went outside his space capsule and looked around, then equated the failure of his eyes to detect God with a proof that God does not exist.

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Source: John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 506–507.

Jacques Maritain on the Kingdom of God vs. the Pagan Empire

In a small book published a few years ago I pointed out the fault which consists in thinking of the spiritual community of the Kingdom of God as if it were itself a temporal community or an earthly city. Let us go deeper. If one reflects upon the opposition which I have just pointed out between the Pagan Empire and the Holy Word, it is necessary to say that each time that a Christian thinks and acts as if hate could triumph over love, and as if the Christian community based itself upon hate of the enemy, of the enemy of the group, of the wicked, just so much does it give way to the spirit of the Empire of the pagan, to the spirit of the world. It would be naive to be astonished that we have followed often the spirit of the world more than the spirit of Christ; it would be a graver matter to hide the fact that, in so far as we betray thus the spirit of Christ, just so much do we wound in the heart Christianity and civilization. [...]

I say that if we believe that the real proof of faith in God and love of God is not only, as some have said it is, to be ready to die for Him but to kill for Him—by just so much are we following the worldly spirit instead of the spirit of Christ, and by just so much are we blaspheming faith in God. For to kill for the Empire is the supreme sign of faith in the Pagan Empire, but the supreme sign of faith in God is to give one’s life to God—not the life of another. “Greater love hath no man than this,” according to the words of Christ, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

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Source: Jacques Maritain, "The Pagan Empire and the Power of God," VQR 15, no. 2 (Spring 1939), March 31, 2010, accessed August 3, 2014, http://www.vqronline.org/essay/pagan-empire-and-power-god.