The Irate Nation

The text I am using for this meditation is Harry Jaffa’s Preface to the Chicago Edition of his work Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The quotes I have picked are found on pages iii-iv. Nothing about Christianity or the problem of knowledge and divinity that I am saying in the comments below his quotes would he agree with. He’s far more right-wing than I am, and I think he would say a turn to piety alone might save us.

The classical understanding of natural right always pointed simultaneously in two directions: one, towards the philosopher’s understanding of the universal, transpolitical dimension of human experience; the other, towards the political man’s understanding of the particular experiences of particular peoples in particular regimes.

The understanding Jaffa speaks of above we must wonder about: do we understand what is “right” in terms of a tension between what is highest and what characterizes us as a people in a specific time and place?

At one level we seem to have such an understanding, for our candidates talk about their morals, or what they feel is absolutely right, and then engage in practices more suited to compromise (unless the issue is stripping the war of funding so that way our soldiers and untold numbers of Iraqis can die and every terrorist and fascist can feel proud of themselves. For that issue, there are plenty of Democrats and Republicans who have oatmeal for brains that accept no compromise).

I would submit to you we have no such understanding, though: our ability to discuss theoretical things is itself wholly enclosed within the sphere of the practical. To see this more clearly:

Classical natural right undertook to guide political men, who need to know what is right here and now, but to guide them in the light of what is just everywhere and always. The problem of natural right is the problem of reconciling the necessary skepticism that accompanies any theoretical enterprise, in which life and death are unimportant episodes in an unending quest, and the necessary dogmatism that accompanies any practical enterprise, in which life and death set inexorable limits within which decision and action must take place.

At this point you are probably asking, “What about Christianity? Doesn’t that give us something higher that informs our practical actions to a large extent? And doesn’t it give a conception we can work with where life and death don’t matter as much in the light of what is highest?”

I think the issue is that Christianity serves in place of a “theoretical,” but is really the most practical form of what is theoretical there is. A good way of seeing this is that we don’t recommend kids read Marx and Nietzsche because they literally can’t be trusted with the ideas in those books – they’ll come across something, misinterpret it, and go crazy thinking that a few words validate their worldview. Similarly, we do recommend they read the Bible because the Bible, at the very least, consistently emphasizes leading a moral life.

Notice this is as far from a “theoretical enterprise” as possible. Learning conceived this way is not a matter of asking questions, but rather obedience and humility (Aristotle says that “modesty” is not a virtue, as it is not desirable in the old, and I think he means this esp. if one is older, knows better, and needs to lead). And there would be nothing wrong with this, actually, if it weren’t for the fact society is falling apart right before our eyes.

One of Nietzsche’s most powerful insights came as he was watching activist movements spring up in the 19th c. (they had their form of hippies, too: Emerson in our country creates the Unitarian “church” as a way to end all religions via a tolerance produced by knowledge; I assume the workers’ and communist movements, combined with the anarchists/nihilists in Europe had similar ideas to the people I deal with daily): he noted that a lot of what we would call “liberal ideology” is Christian logic inverted. One can make the arguments for environmentalism, women’s rights, affirmative action, the welfare state, even to some degree abortion and a “right to privacy” not by using the Bible, but by appealing to the spirit of charity the Bible consistently urges us to have, and the continual striking down of a priestly class in the Old Testament and the Pharisees and Saducees in the New.

The point is, without a place for a higher sort of knowledge, Christianity is at risk of destroying itself; modern democratic life isn’t the only thing which contains self-destructive tendencies. The Middle Ages actually figured out a solution to this problem by being active in speculative endeavors, but that’s all gone now. The proof of whether a religion is true is whether God is allowing conversions and getting people into churches now.

Modern philosophy had attempted to escape the dilemmas arising from the discrete requirements of theory and of practice. It had attempted to employ a radical skepticism which would henceforth enable theoretical philosophy to be absolutely dogmatic, and which would enable practical philosophy to assert that it represented unqualified philosophic truth.

The way “theoretical philosophy” became absolutely dogmatic was that it stopped asking about the human things, and started narrowing its focus. A good way of seeing that is to see that Aristotle holds something to be true in terms of what is characteristic of human nature if it holds true for most men, not all men. But someone like Hobbes would say that “all men fear violent death” with no trace of irony. Hobbes is purposely being partial, in order to solve a problem; however, the more one strives “to solve a problem,” the less connected one’s “science,” i.e. inquiry into nature, becomes from the human things. Practical philosophy takes this narrower point of departure and thus has its hands on what is unqualifiedly true: most “philosophy” now is just modern natural science. We know there is a gravitational force; we know how blood circulates around the body, etc. There is no sense that virtues or values matter, and if there is such a sense, it can only be dogmatic. Our highest faculties have to be purposely excluded from questions of virtue and value, because there is no “certainty” there.

Now I realize I haven’t given an alternative to blind faith in this posting. I’ll start discussing those issues in the next post, how faith and reason can be brought together in order to have a society less practically oriented, and yet truly charitable.

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