This is a piece by Thaddeus Kozinski on religious pluralism and the confessional state. It serves as a nice precis of his excellent book entitled, "The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism".

The Good, the Right, and Theology

Thaddeus J. Kozinski

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heology has been a curious non-interlocutor in most public debates among conservative theists regarding how best to defend the objectivity, intelligibility, and communicability of moral truths and their application to contemporary legal issues, such as racial discrimination, human rights, and abortion. One such debate occurred recently on the pages of On the Square and Public Interest. (For a summary of and commentary on the debate, see Micah Watson’s A Tale of Two Philosophers). The main issue of the debate was not the content of basic moral principles, but their epistemological, ontological, and rhetorical aspects: the fundamental structure of moral thinking and judgment, its relation to what precisely is being thought about and judged, and the most reasonable and effective mode of public ethical and legal discourse. The two interlocutors agreed “that the source of morality is human nature, that human nature is essentially a rational nature, and that moral truths are discoverable through reason apart from revelation,” and they both condemned the moral evil of racial discrimination. What they were at odds about is exactly why this or any evil act is evil, and what makes an act good and a moral principle true. The question comes down to the precise ontic and epistemic character of “ought.”

For Arkes, racial discrimination is a big “ought not” because—and only because—it isunreasonable; it is an act that violates a knowable and known principle of reason, that humans have moral status and dignity by virtue of what makes them human, namely rationality and freedom. Thus, treating a human being as less than human based upon what does not define them essentially as human, such as skin color, is unreasonable and therefore wrong. And since reason is ultimately anchored in the law of non-contradiction, racial discrimination is evil because it violates this most fundamental and self-evident law of human reason. If a human being is properly defined as possessing an essential equality with all other humans, then it is contradictory to commit racial discrimination, since it entails one human being with this essential equality treating another human being as not having this equality. Thus, legal proscriptions against this evil practice, for Arkes, should be explicitly grounded in and justified by just this sort of explanation. O’Brien, on the other hand, identifies Arkes’ characterization of the location, derivation, and justification of moral knowledge as essentially Kantian and therefore problematic: "To have substance, morality needs to go beyond mere rational consistency and find its grounds in the form of ‘rational animality,’ as Aristotle and Aquinas saw, but which Kant mistakenly rejected as ‘heteronomous.’” For O’Brien, moral evil is not evil primarily because it is and is seen to be self-evidently unreasonable in light of some sort of a priori, abstract conception of the rational being as such, but because it is and is seen to be vicious in light of concrete, personal, historical, tradition-constituted, community-informedexperience, in terms of a conception of human flourishing and happiness that answers not so much the question why one ought to do this or that, but what we,qua-members-of-this-community-and-tradition, need in order to live and live well.

As it seems to me, this debate is a scuffle in an ongoing human feud, begun back in the wranglings between the ancient Stoics and Epicureans. It is a war between “two rival versions of moral enquiry,” to use MacIntyre’s expression, eudaimonism and deontologism: an ethics of happiness, flourishing, virtues, eros, and the good, versus an ethics of self-sacrifice, duty, law, agape, and the right. This feud is not going to end any time soon, at least not without some mediation, by a third, peace-making interlocutor.

As I said at the outset, theology, unlike in the ancient debates, has not been an interlocutor in this and virtually all other academic and public discussions of ethics and politics. Sure, the theologian is allowed to have his say, but he is barred from ever having an authoritative say, from being one of those insiders whose deliberations and speculations are to become an integral part of “public reason.” The theologians have a quite compelling story, the philosophers and public policy folks admit, but we need a story more appropriate, more “true,” for our pluralistic, secular, political culture. However, when dealing with the foundations of ethics, the Christian theologian’s story is not just one story among others—it is one that must be read by everyone, for it is meant for everyone. It is ultimately everyone’s story. Moreover, as Radical Orthodoxy has shown, the ostensibly a-theological, secular stories that automatically pass the muster of public reason are nothing if not theologically implicated, even if only implicitly. Now, although the Christian story is everyone’s story, only a very select audience has heard it in its entirety, believed it fully, and made it a model for their own life-stories. Yet, even for the unbeliever, the theologian’s story has clear and arguable logical, ethical, philosophical, legal and political ramifications and components, just as the “non-theological” stories have implicit yet robust theological moorings. Let those who have ears—that is, those who have taken out their old and decrepit, modernist, Enlightenment earplugs—hear: “We are all theologians now.”

The inseparability of faith and reason, in both theory and practice, is one of the main points of Benedict XVI’s encyclical teachings. We can debate the political and philosophical ramifications of the affirmation that we are made in the image of God, that God loves us, and that He commands us to “be perfect as His father in heaven is perfect”; however, in the end, we either affirm these truths or we do not, based upon whether we have or have not encountered the living Christ, caritas in veritate, or perhaps just encountered those Christians who have. So, if human acts are a matter of experience, choice, and grace—not just logic, evidence, and demonstration, whether Aristotelian-eudaimonistic or Kantian-deontological in mode—then any debate about the metaphysical, epistemic, and rhetorical aspects of ethics must invite theology as an interlocutor. And this neglect of theology is the reason that the debate between Arkes and O’Brien is, as it stands, irresolvable.

The problem is that they are both right. O’Brien is correct that arguments about and declarations of principled moral prescriptions and proscriptions, even rigorous and true ones, cannot ensure a public commitment to and embodiment of Christian or even humanistic values in our post-Enlightenment, neo-pagan, pluralistic political culture. Moral principles are experiential, cultural, and historical in their genealogy and in the subjective apparatus of human recognition. But Arkes is right that we can and must transcend these contingencies to see and act on principles in an absolute, universal, and eternal way. In other words, although reason is tradition-dependent (pace Kant), it is also tradition-transcendent (cum Kant). Somehow we must hold these together, and I don’t think we can outside of a theological narrative and discourse.

And the problem is that they are both wrong. Western nation-states lack a shared intellectual tradition to provide grounding for the abstract meaning of universal, human rights and moral values. They also lack a communally shared ethos, which is required for the effective, authentic, and integral political and legal embodiment of rights and values. As O’Brien’s argument suggests, the discourse-of-moral-principle-alone, in prescinding from experiential genealogy and a moderate historicist sensibility, is ultimately sterile. Public reason in today’s secular culture mistakenly eschews any theological dogma that might shed authoritative light on the ultimate meaning, derivation, and fulfillment of human life and experience. On the other hand, as Arkes maintains, a discourse-of-moral-experience-alone absent the universal, history-and-experience transcending logos is ultimately indeterminate, for it is sub-rational. The right and the good must live together or die alone.

Here MacIntyre sums up what he considers the essential problem with a natural-law morality and argumentation that tries to transcend contingency and experience. MacInytre is critiquing Maritain’s “democratic charter,” where natural-law norms, not religious or philosophical particularity, are the bases for political consensus:

What Maritain wished to affirm was a modern version of Aquinas’ thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural knowledge of divine law and hence of what every human being owes to every other human being. The plain pre-philosophical person is always a person of sufficient moral capacities. But what Maritain failed to reckon with adequately was the fact that in many cultures and notably in that of modernity plain persons are misled into giving moral expression to those capacities through assent to false philosophical theories. So it has been since the eighteenth century with assent to a conception of rights alien to and absent from Aquinas’ thought.¹

According to this view, Arkes's model would be analogous to Maritain’s and so not sufficiently aware of the fact that—while men may argue and think about moral truth, and value and pursue moral goods without conscious deference to a particular philosophical theory or religious belief—they nevertheless possess implicit and unconscious philosophical commitments that influence and condition the character and interpretation of that evaluation and pursuit. These commitments determine to some extent the character of behavior that is the conclusion of the practical reasoning that begins with the evaluation and pursuit of a particular good. Since rationality itself is a practice, the former inevitably takes the shape of the particular lived tradition of which it is a part. In practice, then, there is no rationality as such, but only particular rationalities informed by particular religious, philosophical, anthropological, and epistemological commitments that condition the manner in which that rationality is applied to practical questions. Therefore, with citizens divided in traditional allegiance, one should not expect rational agreement on practical matters of a moral nature, especially not on the foundational moral values of the political order. As MacIntyre argues in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?: "There is no way to engage with or to evaluate rationally the theses advanced in contemporary form by some particular tradition except in terms of which are framed with an eye to the specific character and history of that tradition on the one hand and the specific character and history of the particular individual or individuals on the other."²

For MacIntyre, a strictly principled, obligation-laden, logic-derived articulation of moral goods and rights cannot serve as the political foundation of a tradition-pluralistic regime. For we are “tradition-constituted, culturally dependent rational animals” that cannot effectively separate our beliefs from our values and the actions derived from them. Though the citizens in a pluralistic polity may share a common lexicon of “human rights” and “democratic values,” in reality, it is a house built on sand with a sinking foundation of entirely disparate understandings of that lexicon and radically disparate traditions of practical rationality: Thomist, Humean, Kantian, Rousseauian, Nietzchean, Deweyean, et. al. For MacIntyre, shared moral evaluation and understanding is extremely limited, if not impossible altogether, in the absence of a shared tradition of practical rationality, including a common reservoir of theological, philosophical, ethical, and anthropological concepts, and common virtues and goods attained in and through the various practices—especially the architectonic practice of politics—that constitute a shared tradition. This is why we have so much moral disagreement in our public discourse. Tracey Rowland describes MacIntyre’s position: “Macintyre’s analysis raises the question of whether there can be any such things as ‘universal values,’ understood not in a natural law sense, but rather…the idea that there is a set of values which are of general appeal across a range of traditions, including the Nietzschean, Thomist, and Liberal traditions.” MacIntyre again:

Abstract from the particular theses to be debated and evaluated from their contexts within traditions of enquiry and then attempt to debate and evaluate them in terms of their rational justifiability to any rational person, to individuals conceived as abstracted from their particularities of character, history, and circumstance, and you will thereby make the kind of rational dialogue which could move through argumentative evaluation to the rational acceptance of rejection of a tradition of enquiry effectively impossible. Yet it is just such abstraction in respect of both of the theses to be debated and the persons to be engaged in the debate which is enforced in the public forms of enquiry and debate in modern liberal culture, thus for the most part effectively precluding the voices of tradition outside liberalism from being heard.³

But let us suppose it is true that citizens belonging to the same narrative tradition would form a more unified, robust, stable and strong political order, so that exceptionless and self-evident rights and laws deriving ultimately from the law of non-contradiction and man’s obvious end-in-himself dignity, would serve as the most effective public discourse. Unfortunately, the demographic and sociological exigencies of the modern, pluralistic nation state preclude such narrative unity. We cannot have forced conversions to our narrative of choice, and so we must accept the limitations of our “concrete historical ideal,” as Maritain would say: the fact of religious pluralism requires us to attempt, even if it seems impossible, the separation of the public, legal, political sphere from the particularity of our traditions. But can such be done? Is this kind of acquired schizophrenia necessary to be a good pluralist citizen?

Conservative theists endorse wholeheartedly the infusion of integrally religious practices and discourse into the naked public square; yet they also tend to limit the participation in and scope of these practices and discourses to the in-house crowd, as it were. For those outside their tradition, and for the secular public sphere in general, a program of translation— a translation of dogma, ritual, charitable acts, and especially the natural law. It is urged to speak only the language of principled, universal “public reason” to strangers, thereby secularizing, moralizing, and politicizing what is distinctly theological and spiritual in our tradition, both in doctrine and in practice, to render it intelligible to non-theists and practically effective for secular society.

However, this strategy presupposes two fundamental ideas that need to be reexamined. The first is that there is such a thing as the “secular,” that is, an ideologically neutral, universal, public world accessible to and based upon a universal public reason, abstracted from the practical and speculative particularities of tradition. However, if not, if there is no objective, public reason, then it would seem that all we are left with are the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion, or the will to power, where any affirmation of true or good is unmasked as either mere idiosyncrasy or the will to dominate. The second idea that must be reconsidered is the easy separability of theoria and praxis, the confidence that one can effectively strain out from the concrete practices and particularist discourse of one’s tradition a secular, universally accessible remainder that is intelligible to all regardless of traditional allegiance.

Regarding the existence of a secular reason or public space neutral to any particular tradition, MacIntyre writes:

Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of particular interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness. What this alternative conceals from view is a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.⁴

For MacIntyre, as well as, I think, for O’Brien, it is only through active participation in particular authentic traditions that men are rendered capable of discovering and achieving their ultimate good. For it is always through a particular tradition that we ascend to universal truth. Indeed, without tradition we are unable to make any sense of reality at all, because our bodies, minds, and souls are, largely, products of tradition themselves. As body and soul composites, our encounters with reality are mediated by bodies, which are themselves mediated by history and culture. Even the words and concepts we use to interpret and make sense of the brute facts of reality originate and develop in what MacIntyre calls “traditions of rationality.” All men are necessarily habituated into a particular tradition, even if it is an incoherent and considerably defective one like the tradition of liberalism. Outside of tradition, coherent knowledge and discovery of the good is practically impossible. We are, in MacIntyre’s improvement on Aristotle’s classic definition, “tradition-dependent rational animals.” As Paul Griffiths puts it: “To be confessional is simply to be open about one’s historical and religious locatedness, one’s specificity, and openness that is essential for serious theological work and indeed for any serious intellectual work that is not in thrall to the myth of the disembodied and unlocated scholarly intellect.”⁵

Regarding the capacity to translate particular religious truth into non-religious public reason, MacIntyre articulates what can be called the traditionalist dilemma:

The theologian begins from orthodoxy, but the orthodoxy which has been learnt from Kierkegaard and Barth becomes too easily a closed circle, in which believer speaks only to believer, in which all human content is concealed. Turning aside from this arid in-group theology, the most perceptive theologians wish to translate what they have to say to an atheistic world. But they are doomed to one of two failures. Either [a] they succeed in their translation: in which case what they find themselves saying has been turned into the atheism of their hearers. Or [b] they fail in their translation: in which case no one hears what they have to say but themselves.⁶

Is there a solution to this dilemma? Is there a resolution between Arkes and O’Brien, between eudaimonism and deontologism? If there is, the indispensable condition for its realization, I think, is the recognition of the illusory nature of secularist liberal pluralism. Indeed, there is really no such thing as “liberalism,” if this means a sphere of reason or action that escapes the particularism and exclusivity of tradition. And there is also no such thing as “the secular” since traditions of rationality are distinguished by the particular way they grapple with matters of ultimate concern—all traditions are ultimately religious. This has great political implications. David Schindler writes: “A nonconfessional state is not logically possible, in the one real order of history. The state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of religion, a priority of either ‘freedom from’ or ‘freedom for’—both of these priorities implying a theology.”⁷

If believing theists of diverse traditions do not think, speak, and act distinctively as Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims—bringing their intellectual, moral, and liturgical traditions wherever they go in imitation of Socrates, whom Catherine Pickstock calls a “walking liturgy,” then our “ecumenical jihad” stands no chance at converting the “liberal traditionalists” of the culture of death, who have no qualms about communicating to themselves and others exclusively in their religious parlance of tolerance and diversity, and inviting all into their liturgical practices of abortion, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia. Indeed, they see themselves as the “true believers,” the only ones truly defending “life,” with us as the heretics, obsessed only with death and control.

How can these deluded devotees have any hope of ever renouncing their enslaving tradition unless they are made aware of its enslaving character? And how can they become aware unless they have some palpable experience of an alternative? The tradition they inhabit deprives them of the existential conditions required to see moral truths, let alone religious ones, as Tristram Englehardt has pointed out: “In the grip of Enlightenment dispositions regarding religion, few are inclined to recognize that the moral life once disengaged from a culture of worship loses its grasp on the moral premises that rightly direct our lives and foreclose the culture of death.”⁸ D. Stephen Long puts the whole point powerfully:

Beginning with the flesh of Jesus and its presence in the church, theology alone can give due order to other social formations—family, market, and state. The goodness of God is discovered not in abstract speculation, but in a life oriented toward God that creates particular practices that require the privileging of certain social institutions above others. The goodness of God can be discovered only when the church is the social institution rendering intelligible our lives. . . . For a Christian account of this good, the church is the social formation that orders all others. If the church is not the church, the state, the family, and the market will not know their own true nature.⁹

Moral judgments are certainly principled judgments, and we should search for and declare these principles, even enforce them in law. Yet, all principles of reason, whether moral or logical, are first and foremost expressions of the divine logos, who can be encountered in and through his manifold, principled, universal expressions, but absent a personal, experiential encounter with Him through Faith, in the very particular place and time where His Flesh becomes available to touch and experience, principles are just principles—fleshless, bloodless, and dead.

Thaddeus J. Kozinski is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College.

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 76. [back]

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 398. [back]

3. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 399. [back]

4. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 59.[back]

5. Paul J. Griffiths, “The Uniqueness of Christian Doctrine Defended” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996 ), 169. [back]

6. Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 19-20.[back]

7. David Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans and T&T Clark, 1996), 83. [back]

8. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “Life & Dearth after Christendom: The Moralization of Religion & the Culture of Death,” Touchstone (June, 2001), accessed on June 21, 2007; available fromhttp://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=14-05-018-f. [back]

9. D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God: Theology the Church and Social Order (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 26, 28.

I think you'll like this piece by Joseph Baldachinno I took from the Front Porch Republic, one of my favorite sites. Baldachinno does a good job of explaining why the problem with conservatism is not electoral or political in any other sense but moral and philosophical.

In the wake of the 2008 elections the Republican Party looked to be on its last legs. Not only had Barack Obama triumphed in the presidential race, picking up the electoral votes of such previously “red” states as Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, but the Democrats had widened the majorities they had gained while taking over both houses of Congress two years earlier. Flush with victory, the Democrats, perhaps understandably, interpreted the 2008 election returns as a mandate for their “progressive” policy agenda, which they proceeded to enact into law with gusto, helping in the process to increase the total public debt outstanding from $10.6 trillion on Inauguration Day 2009 to $13.6 trillion a scant 22 months later.
Then came the mid-term elections of 2010, and the liberal ideological consensus that had seemed so palpable turned out to have been a mirage. Not only did the GOP garner the biggest mid-term gain in House seats achieved by either party since 1938, winning 56 percent of the 435 seats in contention, but the GOP also won an even larger 65 percent of this year’s thirty-seven Senate races. Perhaps even more impressive were Republican gains in the state houses, where they are poised to dominate the congressional redistricting process for the coming decade by controlling 29 of the 50 state governorships and at least 57 of the 99 state legislative chambers.
Will the apparent mandate for a pronounced rightward turn in matters of public policy prove any more lasting or substantial than the one in favor of progressivism that went a-glimmering in the 2010 election? If recent American history is any guide, the answer to this question is: Not very likely. Consider the elections of the past 30 years.
Certainly, 1980 seemed at the time to signal a sea-change in the nation’s ideological allegiances. Not only did Ronald Reagan, the undisputed leader of the conservative movement, sweep to victory over the liberal Democratic White House incumbent, Jimmy Carter, but he also brought in on his coattails Republican control of the Senate, marking the first time the GOP had won a majority of either congressional chamber since 1952. The Democrats, who had controlled the House consistently since 1954, resumed control of the Senate in 1986.
The next significant change occurred in 1992 when the Democrats, led by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, regained the White House after a twelve-year absence. A seemingly more seismic shift in the opposite direction came just two years later when Republicans, spearheaded by Rep. Newt Gingrich (Ga.), gained simultaneous control of both the House and Senate for the first time since the election of 1952.
Though Clinton was reelected in 1996, the Republican congressional ascendancy that began in 1994 continued with only a minor interruption until the 2006 off-year election. In that year, as mentioned, the Democrats regained control of the House: a victory that presaged the Democrats’ sweep of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2008.
Based on the foregoing thumbnail history, the political contests that were most worthy of the label “redefining” or “wave” elections during the past three decades occurred, except for that of 2010, at fourteen-year intervals in 1980, 1994, and 2008. It should be noted that in each of these contests the party that triumphed was the beneficiary of disgust in the electorate with the record of the party in power. Reagan’s 1980 election was in large part a reaction to the economic and foreign policy failures of Jimmy Carter, most notably inflation and interest rates in double digits and the Iranian hostage crisis.
In 1994 the Republicans benefited from the Clintons’ overreaching on national health care and from years of entrenched corruption in the Democrat-controlled Congress, exemplified by scandals involving House Speaker Jim Wright (Tex.), who resigned in 1989, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (Ill.), who was forced to relinquish all leadership posts in 1994 before going down to electoral defeat in that same year. By 2008, amidst the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, even many Republicans were worn down by the George W. Bush Administration’s many domestic and foreign policy lapses, which provided a ready audience for Obama and the Democrats’ siren song of “change.”
On this evidence, neither major party can lay claim to the support of a stable majority either for its espoused policy prescriptions or for demonstrated political competence. Rather, the nation has become polarized between ardent devotees of Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. Elections are determined by a group in the middle that oscillates between the two sides to register dissatisfaction whenever the status quo becomes sufficiently difficult to tolerate. If the most recent “wave” election suggests anything new at all, it may be that the oscillations are becoming more frequent and more pronounced.
Yet Republican leaders in Washington, D.C., have assured us in the wake of their 2010 congressional gains that their victory will not lull them into a false sense of security. The GOP, they insist, recognizes that it is on probation. The Democrats won in 2008 because the Bush Administration failed to live up to conservative principles, and the public will turn against the Republicans again if they don’t mend their ways. But this time will be different, they assure us, because Republicans have understood the public’s message, and this time, under the watchful eye of “Tea Party” activists, Republicans will do the public’s bidding.
“Across the country right now,” explained incoming Speaker John Boehner on election night, “we are witnessing a repudiation of Washington, a repudiation of big government, and a repudiation of politicians who refuse to listen to the people, because, for far too long, Washington’s been doing what’s best for Washington, not what’s best for the American people. Tonight, that begins to change.”
How credible is such rhetoric? At first blush it may seem marginally more plausible than the Democrats’ explanation that the voters would have approved their programs if only they had understood them. But, in fact, not only American government but American society in general have grown increasingly dysfunctional over the past half century. Deep down, many serious observers know this, but few, regardless of political persuasion or walk of life, want to face the depressing reality. To do so would require difficult changes in the way we live. Instead of accepting the necessary pain, we are tempted to look away from the actual situation. We create imaginative visions that paint our dominant desires and inclinations in the best light and excuse us from mending our self-indulgent ways.
Barring difficult efforts of will, the human tendency is to pick and choose parts of reality that would justify sticking to our favored mode of existence. We come up with ideas and slogans—even entire ideologies—that present as actual historical reality not the world as it is but the world as we would like it to be, this in order for us to be able to live as we please. So, when politicians wax eloquent about “conservative principles” no less than when they speak glowingly of “progressive ideals,” the question must be asked: Are they addressing the real world in all its complexity or are they presenting an imaginative dream that advances hidden motives?
All humans are more or less prone to hiding inconvenient truths—from others, certainly, but perhaps most significantly from themselves. The reason is ultimately moral laziness. We know only too well our own weaknesses, but we shrink from the hard inner work that morality and happiness require. As Irving Babbitt observed, all humans want to attain happiness on the cheap—to reap the fruits of the spirit without exerting spiritual effort. This tendency toward escapism has become increasingly common in modern Western society. The pre-modern West—heavily influenced by classical and especially Christian culture—taught that man is born with obligations not only to self but to his fellow members of society: in Jesus’ words, to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
For Aristotle, as for Thomas Aquinas, the purpose of politics and law was to further the common good of society which was shared by all in the sense that it was good for its own sake. Differently put, there is a self in man that is more than individual and higher than mere enlightened self-interest whose nature is to foster genuine community among people. But in the sixteenth century a philosophical and moral revolution began. Encouraged by thinkers such as Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, promotion of the common good was displaced as society’s ultimate purpose by the lesser goal of trying to maximize the satisfaction of conflicting individual and group interests.
Are the Republicans right? Will adhering to “conservative principles” begin to correct the serious problems now besetting American society and thereby provide what is “best for the American people”? Clearly, that depends on what is meant by “conservative principles.” The think tank intellectuals and hired guns are ready with glib answers. Conservatism means “liberty” or “freedom.” It means “limited government.” It means “constitutionalism,” “free markets,” “private property.” But these are general terms, which can each have very different—even opposite—meanings. Whether the mentioned ideas are good or bad depends upon what is meant and the purposes served in each instance.
Traditional conservatives—from Edmund Burke and John Adams in the eighteenth century to Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk in the twentieth—supported liberty, property, and restraints on government but not as ultimate ends in themselves. They saw them as conducive to efficient production and other commodious arrangements, but most importantly as means to the higher ends of society, which can be summarized in the term “community.”
Contrary to much influential modern thought—Jean-Jacques Rousseau being the most conspicuous example—goodness does not flow spontaneously from human impulses but requires sustained moral effort and supporting cultural and political institutions. Burke recognized the extent to which in England and Europe the latter had been painstakingly developed over centuries. Government, together with other social structures, is necessary to put restraints on actions and desires inimical to man’s higher potential. How much government is needed and what kind cannot be determined in the abstract, but depends on the character of the people of a specific time and place.
For Burke and other traditional conservatives, liberty understood as equally appropriate to all conceivable circumstances is not only irrational but dangerous. Concerning the abstract liberty promoted by the French Jacobins and their supporters, Burke wrote: “I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman . . . . But I cannot . . . give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions . . . on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in . . . metaphysical abstraction. . . . Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? . . .
“I should, therefore,” Burke continued, “suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long.”
Similarly, John Adams, in an October 18, 1790, letter to his cousin Samuel Adams, wrote: “‘The love of liberty,’ you say, ‘is interwoven in the soul of man.’ So it is, according to La Fontaine, in that of a wolf; and I doubt whether it be much more rational, generous, or social, in one than in the other, until in man it is enlightened by experience, reflection, education, and civil and political institutions.”
In other words, when it becomes common for economic actors, be they janitors or heads of hedge funds, to set aside normal moral and cultural restraints when at work, it will undermine not only the quality of their everyday existence but also damage the honesty and integrity on which a well-functioning market and indeed all civilized life depend. It needs to be understood that in a time of precipitous moral decline freedom may actually become positively destructive of the higher purposes of society. Imagine historical circumstances in which captains of finance have, because of a general moral decline, become unscrupulous, caring little about the welfare of their customers, employees, or society at large. In such a situation, a mentality of unmitigated greed might become pervasive. On the other hand, freedom may become something altogether different where economic and cultural elites embody and expect high standards.
Yet, when the conservative movement so powerful in American politics over the past half century was getting its intellectual start in the 1950s, it became apparent very soon that its participants were profoundly at odds concerning the meaning of freedom, which hinges on the fundamental nature of man and society. Along with Burke and most framers of the American constitution—and in keeping with the pre-modern classical and Christian heritage—conservative academics such as Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, and the economist Wilhelm Röpke denounced as reductionism the notion that human beings, who are almost wholly dependent on society for the very attributes that make them human, are ultimately obligated to nothing beyond individual self-interest.
They agreed with Babbitt that freedom, property, constitutional government, and similar rights derive their immense value not primarily from their usefulness to the self-indulgent selves that divide men and women one from another but from their usefulness to the higher or universal self that wills what is good for its own sake and is the basis of community. Indeed, Babbitt held that American liberties owed their very existence to the classical and Christian moral and religious heritage.
But other influential movement founders held the opposite view. Taking sharp issue with the “New Conservatism” of Kirk, Nisbet, Peter Viereck, and others, Frank S. Meyer, who would become a prime architect of the movement, declared sweepingly in a 1955 article that “all value resides in the individual; all social institutions derive their value and, in fact, their very being from individuals and are justified only to the extent that they serve the needs of individuals.” Meyer’s radical individualism, which he attributed in large part to John Stuart Mill, was shared to various degrees by numerous others whose ideas helped shape the early conservative movement, including the economists Ludwig von Mises, Friederich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.
Movement conservatism was thus divided from its beginning on the central issue of man’s moral nature and its relation to politics and liberty. Yet, by the mid-1960s, serious theoretical argument had given way to an ostensible consensus, dubbed “fusionism.” This ideological position, whose leading exponent was Frank Meyer himself, has been summarized as holding that “virtue is the ultimate end of man as man,” but that individual freedom is the “ultimate political end.” Indeed, according to Meyer’s relatively mature, “fusionist” position, the “achievement of virtue” was none of the state’s business, hence not a political question at all.
Despite its label, Meyer’s “fusionism” never achieved a genuine philosophical synthesis of Burkean conservatism and the ideology of classical liberalism or libertarianism. A genuine synthesis would have been impossible, for the two opposing positions are based on contradictory assumptions. For traditional conservatives, the notion that freedom can exist in the absence of moral restraint flies in the face of all historical experience.
Adam Smith, who is widely regarded as the father of economics, noted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, for example, that “upon the tolerable observance” of such duties as politeness, justice, trust, chastity, and fidelity “depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for these important rules of conduct.” Smith added that social order is not spontaneous or automatic, but is founded on institutions that promote self control, prudence, gratification deferral, respect for the lives and property of others, and some concern for the common good.
Burke, who was an admirer of Smith, similarly wrote: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity . . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” Hence, for traditional conservatism as represented by Burke, by Smith in important respects, and by the American constitutional framers, the advancement of political liberty in any meaningful sense necessarily entails the simultaneous advancement of an ethic of individual restraint and responsibility in support of the common good. Success in the first is impossible without success in the second. To suggest otherwise, according to traditional conservatism, would be absurd.
Yet Meyer’s fusionism does precisely that. He elevates the pursuit of liberty to the highest goal of politics while ignoring freedom’s dependence on moral restraint and its corresponding institutional and cultural supports. True enough, in his overtures for the traditionalists’ support, Meyer pays homage to man’s higher ends, even to religion, yet it is clear from his writings that he remains at a loss concerning what those ends entail. As late as 1962 he was still asserting, for example, the reality of the “rational, volitional, autonomous individual” versus the “myth of society.”
Remove the effects of society on human life for but an hour, a Burke or a Smith would respond to Meyer, and he would recognize soon enough the part of reality he had missed.
A telling measure of morality’s lack of significance in Meyer’s fusionism is that it paralleled the place accorded to religion by many avid secularists: religion is all right as a private matter, but it has no legitimate place in public life. According to Meyer, the constitutional framers shared his preference for separating morality and politics, but this would have come as startling news to George Washington, among others, who said in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . . [R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
In the end, all that separated Meyer’s fusionist position from libertarianism was the superimposition of a few traditionalist-sounding rhetorical flourishes. In respect to their practical import for how Americans participate in private and public life, the two positions were identical. Such was the considered opinion of the late libertarian scholar and activist Murray N. Rothbard, as expressed in the Fall 1981 issue of Modern Age. Yet, beginning in the mid-1960s, large numbers of Americans who would have been reluctant to embrace libertarianism that was labeled as such found themselves able to do so when it was newly packaged, with the assistance of Meyer and his fusionist allies, as “conservatism.”
As George Nash observed in his 1976 history of American intellectual conservatism, “rather surprisingly, by the mid-1960s the tumult began to subside. Perhaps, as Meyer remarked, the disputants had run out of fresh things to say. Certainly, they had other topics on their mind—the rise of Senator Goldwater, for instance. And, as the dust settled, many conservatives made a common discovery: that Meyer’s fusionism had won. Quietly, with little fanfare, by a process [Meyer] later called, ‘osmosis,’ fusionism became, for most National Review conservatives, a fait accompli.”
What Nash here reports as a victory for fusionism may have been such in practice but certainly not in theory. A major and festering moral and philosophical problem had been swept under the rug. This could happen because those most directly involved had much less interest in philosophical stringency than in issues of practical politics.
Ironically, in the same 1981 issue of Modern Age in which the libertarian Rothbard explained that Meyer’s fusionism was actually libertarianism, Russell Kirk posed the question of what conservatism (of the traditionalist or pre-fusionist variety) and libertarianism have in common. His answer was that, except for sharing “a detestation of collectivism”—an opposition to “the totalist state and the heavy hand of bureaucracy”—conservatives and libertarians have “nothing” in common. “Nor will they ever have,” he added. “To talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of fire and ice.”
Leveling against libertarianism criticism that could have applied equally to Meyer’s fusionism, Kirk wrote: “The ruinous failing of the ideologues who call themselves libertarians is their fanatic attachment to a simple solitary principle—that is, to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil social order, and indeed of human existence.” The libertarians, Kirk reported, borrowed whole from John Stuart Mill’s 1859 book On Liberty the principle that “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.”18
As noted previously, fusionism, too, made Mill’s principle sacrosanct, denying any legitimate place in politics for promoting moral restraint. The ability of every individual to act without regard for the common good was elevated to the highest end of conservative politics. All of conservatism’s subsidiary political goals—limited government, free enterprise, private property, minimal taxation—became similarly associated with the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest.
If society is considered less than real, the highest goal for which the individual can strive is to be able to do as he or she pleases to the greatest extent possible. And since doing as he or she pleases is synonymous with freedom by the fusionists’ definition, it follows that, for them in their heart of hearts, there never can be too much liberty or (which is to say the same thing) too little government. To view the world in the light of such broad generalizations discourages subtlety of mind and attention to the needs of actual historical situations. “If you believe in the capitalist system,” Rush Limbaugh explained in a September 2009 television interview, “then you have to erase from your whole worldview what does somebody need. It’s not about need. . . . it is about doing whatever you want to do.”
In contrast with the one-sided emphasis on freedom characteristic of movement conservatism since the 1960s, traditional conservatism views both government and limits on government as necessary responses to man’s flawed moral nature. Because men are not angels, as Madison observed, government is needed to help restrain their passions. But since governments are made of fallible men and not angels, governments also must be limited: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Similarly, Burke instructed: “To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; and only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraints in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.”
Unfortunately, what America has lacked during much of its history and increasingly so is “free government” such as advocated by the framers, Burke, Babbitt, Kirk, and other traditional conservatives. Instead, the tendency has been for political power and the control of government to lurch back and forth between Big Government “progressives” who are prone always and everywhere to “teach obedience” and Small Government “conservatives” (or libertarians) who are prone always and everywhere to “let go the rein.”
Because guided by abstract generalizations rather than historical reality, ideologues of both types are blind to the changing proportions of liberty and restraint appropriate to actual circumstances. The assumption of power by either group, therefore, inevitably heralds trouble. The response of the electorate almost invariably has been to displace one set of rascals with its opposite number only to have the process repeat itself ’ere long.
What about the most recent election? Does the latest shift in favor of “conservative principles” signal a departure from the long-established dysfunctional pattern? To reiterate what was stated tentatively above: The answer depends on what is meant by conservative principles. Almost certainly more dysfunction is on the way. Is there a way to get out of this cycle? One necessary step is to face complex reality and to break the morally and philosophically lazy habits that stand in the way of understanding the prerequisites of liberty.
Some who think of themselves as libertarians may object to the argument here offered that they do recognize that liberty needs moral, cultural, and institutional supports and that liberty is not an end in itself. Such libertarians may be closer to the traditional conservatives than they realize. Their “libertarianism” does in fact suggest the kind of philosophically tenable rapprochement between liberals and conservatives that Meyer’s “fusionism” clearly failed to achieve.

Joseph Baldacchino is president of the National Humanities Institute and editor of Humanitas.
This article was originally published by the National Humanities Institute in Epistulae No. 11, December 2, 2010.

This is an address I gave last December at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal

The Problem of Modernity

Richard J. Divozzo

[delivered at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal on 12/11/2010]

S

ome of you had requested in previous meetings of the Inquisitors that I talk about my book, The Church and the Culture of Modernity, and I hope in these all too brief reflections to satisfy your curiosity.  In view of this special venue at the Russell Kirk Center, rather than introduce my book per se I will instead to try to whet your appetite -- if it needs whetting -- for what the book concerns, viz., the problem of Modernity and indicate why the particular view of the problem I take in my book should be of value to conservatives.  Although I don’t have much to say (directly) about conservatism in the book, the problem of modernity has a philosophical provenance, which I explore, that has produced the cultural, social, and ultimately spiritual disorder that has for so long preoccupied conservatism. The best conservative thought has long understood that religious truth is fundamental to a well-ordered society and that the secularization of society is somehow collateral with or even the cause of its moral decline.  Modern thought is everywhere reified by a thoroughly secularized society. But by and large conservatives have done little better than the drafters of Gaudium et spes, (Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church and the Modern World) in understanding the dangers of modernity and secularization to Christian civilization.  Both have been in important ways swept away by the force of history in spite of that great Catholic conservative, the late W. F. Buckley’s, defiant claim to stand athwart History and shout “Stop!”.   History has a way of making things seem inevitable, and what we think inevitable we have an irresistible urge to submit to as necessary.  Notwithstanding notable exceptions like Dr. Kirk, conservatives have, in my view, taken modernity in stride, submitting to it, without understanding it very well, as an historical necessity like good Hegelians. They have made their peace with it as many in the Church have done.

Modernity is something that conservatism has concerned itself with as fundamental to its social critique.  Conservatism has always, or at least until recent times, argued that tradition is essential to a just order of society. Dr. Kirk, we all know, was constant in his insistence, echoing Christopher Dawson, that the origin of culture is fundamentally religious and, therefore, traditionary. This fact of human society and human nature is why our modern secularized culture is so assiduously and self-consciously anti-religious.  

But Conservatism has, I think, tended to eschew strictly philosophical questions. Its critique of modernity has, in the main, treated only Modernity’s foul and unsightly lesions on the face of modern culture rather than its causes.  To be sure, the symptoms of a disease have to be treated too. But in so far as Conservatism has ever been a coherent political philosophy, it has not primarily concerned itself with the roots of political authority and obligation. Those roots have to do with the existence of divine law and man’s existential relation to it as a rational moral being.  And there, I submit, the whole matter ultimately lay.  I have tried in my book to examine the errors of thought that begot Modernity and identify them as integral to the unconscious habits of thought that make or unmake a civilized culture and which in this case have unmade a specifically Christian culture.  What I have called the culture of modernity is precisely the metastasizing of those errors of thought throughout all of civilized life.  Certainly, for the last hundred years at least it has no longer been only a matter of errors of thought but the destructive cultural habits they have produced.  But because that is so, the errors have become invisible to us. We have forgotten the pedigree of the modern world’s apostasy.  Still more to the point, we have tended to forget that it is apostate, and that all questions of political authority and obligation are ultimately theological. Hence, the importance of Dr. Kirk’s emphasizing that religious belief is at the root of culture.

For this reason, the problem of Modernity can be seen as the problem of the culture of modernity. And this is so, in so far as modern thought has destroyed the religious foundation of the old culture of the west by so thoroughly secularizing it.  It seems to be largely ignored today among conservatives and many Catholics that the old culture of the west was a specifically Christian culture, embarrassed as we are by the very idea of the confessional state.   And what we call “religious freedom” in our modern pluralist liberal democracies has done almost nothing to prevent its destruction.  Religious freedom as supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution is a canard of the liberal mythology. This, I think, is an issue that, again with some notable exceptions, conservatives in America have largely failed to address or even understand until recently (I refer you to Kenneth Craycraft’s excellent book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom).

Conservatives have not themselves been free of the taint of Modernity, intellectually or culturally. We see this in the way conservatives (again, with notable exceptions, like Wilhelm Roepke and Dr. Kirk – I’m thinking of The Humane Economy and Progress for Conservatives respectively) have so uncritically embraced capitalism and its failure to see in it the unsatisfactory nature of Enlightenment premises to a Christian civilization and the fatal affinity of the American founding to those premises. 

There is no escaping the fact that ideas have consequences, in that famous phrase we are so fond of repeating. But surely Richard Weaver meant all ideas have consequences.  The ideas that have been most consequential are the profoundest ones, namely the conclusions of modern philosophy with respect to being and knowing, which Weaver himself  (to whose book by that title my own bears some affinity) was careful to examine but which conservatism, preoccupied as it has been with superficies  of  what ails our society, has overlooked. Conservatism has rightly or wrongly avoided this theatre of battle with modernity, but I contend that it is only here that the war will be won or lost. Conservatives have always insisted on right thinking, but have, in the main, not considered what are the philosophical foundations of right thinking.

So what is Modernity and what are its roots? Before answering that question to which there is no very neat crib to keep in your pocket or purse, let’s for a moment consider what it is not. Modernity is not to be identified with everything new, with innovation, with thinking outside the box – if, that is, the “box” is the received “wisdom” of the modern world. Indeed, to think out of the “Box” today, is to be madly and maddeningly innovative. For to the modern world what we old-line conservatives call the great intellectual tradition of the west -- which is profoundly Catholic -- grows increasingly unintelligible and unknown to contemporary man (which, sadly, includes many Catholics -- witness the consternation and obscurantism -- even among Catholic conservatives -- over the economic principles of distributism). 

So, Modernity is not everything that is not the past; it is, however, a rejection of the past.  But to define Modernity even thus is to miss the boat.  It is, again, to treat only a symptom. If you seek to know why it hates and excludes tradition, which is the past’s participation in the present, you will find that its hostility is rooted in its rootlessness, in its rejection of a transcendent authority which itself is a consequence of the rejection of (get ready) metaphysical realism.  A book would scarcely be adequate to fully expound on that statement. It will here have to be enough to say that metaphysical realism is that  philosophical doctrine which teaches that knowledge comes to us by a direct perception of reality and the intellects innate power to abstract from that perception  what things are in themselves. What we do in every moment of consciousness, modern thought has denied. The denial, rarified and abstract as a point of philosophical debate 8 centuries ago, has reticulated through time into every crevice of modern thought and sensibility. It has divorced us from reality.  Reality – contrary to the deepest assumptions of the modern mind -- is not something we make -- or ever could make --but what we receive, what is given.  To misconstrue what the senses tell us about the reality outside our minds is to, say, mistake your car for a boat and then try to “sail” Lake Michigan. Worse still, to reject the very principle that our minds enjoy a direct connection to reality is to misunderstand the world entirely and ourselves principally with the result that we can delude ourselves into thinking that the moving, pulsing thing of flesh and blood in a woman’s womb cannot be human. Ideas indeed have consequences.

And they have deep roots that go back as far as 14th Century scholastic debate over universals and the Franciscan theologian and philosopher, William of Ockham, who, breaking with all tradition (and some say common sense) denied that fundamental tenet of realism, that the mind is adequate to understand reality. Others before him, like Duns Scotus, had come close but it was Ockham who willfully stepped over the edge into a profound skepticism.

While Ockham was by no means a modern skeptic or rationalist, he nevertheless considered many of the theological truths he certainly embraced as philosophically or rationally untenable, like the existence of God and the divine attributes, and the freedom and immortality of man. Yet he had no intention of casting doubt on them as objects of belief.  But Ockham had a very strict and unusually narrow idea of what constitutes a demonstration of the truth of any proposition.   He thought propositions like the immortality of the soul and divine omnipotence could be known only by faith, not by reason. There was no philosophical proof of these propositions that could satisfy him. For him sufficient reason for adequate proof was experience of these things. Ockham did not, as some have supposed, try to cleanse philosophy of its theological contaminants, but considered the realist metaphysics of the 13^th Century as he knew and understood it (which is not very well) as contaminating the purity of the Christian faith and wanted to liberate it.   The whole Greek tradition of metaphysical realism was to his mind alien to Christian theology. It shackled it to something that he thought could destroy belief. There is a stiff-necked empiricism about Ockham’s insistence that philosophical knowledge has to be based on experience.  This same empiricism, which for the devout Franciscan is a clumsy hammer he uses against any possible skepticism, becomes 400 years later the siege gun Hume levels against any possible knowledge so-called that is not empirical. Ockham’s thought is very difficult and in some respects confused (as Etienne Gilson has observed: many have tried to make perfect sense of it and failed). Now, Ockham was not, like Hume, a thoroughgoing empiricist; but it was by his philosophical conclusions from empirical principles that he made his indelible mark on the world of thought and then on the world of action. In my book, I explore in more detail this slide from Ockham’s nominalism toward Hume’s complete skepticism and beyond that to Kant’s answer to Hume.  Here I can give you only the barest sketch.

Rather than saving the world from skepticism, Ockham’s nominalism (or conceptualism) had the effect of making the slide to it even more slippery by corrupting Scholasticism in the 200 years between him and the “re-discovery” of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas in the 16^th century, who represents the best of scholasticism, which alone, I insist, could defeat skepticism.  A nominalist scholasticism was helpless against this petulant skepticism and made for much doubt and confusion in philosophical circles.

The man who, self-appointed, would rescue us all from doubt was of course Rene Descartes. (With such “friends” who needs enemies.) Rejecting empiricism that Ockham had tortuously combined with his scholastic rationalism or dialectic, Descartes reduced all genuine knowledge to a pure rationalism, to which mathematics was the supreme science.  As we all know, Descartes’ mathematicism, which was to put our knowledge of transcendent reality on the surest possible footing, had the unintended consequence of putting all of extramental reality in doubt by subjectivizing all knowledge by his well-known mind/body dichotomy which eliminated with one stroke the Greek and scholastic conception of the mind as adequate to the understanding reality as received by the senses.  According to the Cartesian dichotomy, the senses tell us nothing we can rely on as knowledge or even leading to knowledge, which can come only through the basic intuitive concepts that inhere in the mind. In other words, the mind has no way of contact with external reality except through its own internal framework. The mind becomes the “ghost in the machine”.

Descartes’ was a powerful mind and his philosophy had tremendous influence, but it could not please all of the people all of the time.  His extreme rationalism did nothing to permanently staunch the flow of belief that was bleeding from the opened veins of European thought. Instead it produced that monster of skepticism, David Hume, who denied on empirical grounds the validity even of the Principle of Causality.  To the extent that any possible meaning that we perceive in nature depends on causality, formal, material, and efficient, -- which is just about all meaning -– we would have, on Hume’s reckoning, to simply accustom ourselves to doubt.

So, from Ockham (who was no evil genius -- just wrong – and rather stubborn) in the 14^th century the trail leads directly to Descartes in the 17^th, who in attempting to eliminate all philosophical skepticism with his thoroughgoing rationalism only deepened it. His rationalism gave way to the equal and opposite reaction of Hume’s

And it was Kant who gave the coup de grace to any answer modern philosophy might provide to the philosophical questions of being and knowing.  Kant’s idealism curiously had the settling effect (at least for a great many), after Hume, of almost contenting us with our inability to know any transcendent reality or, for that matter anything at all objectively.

Kant’ philosophy is the great watershed in modern thought, because his thought seems to encompass all that preceded it and because it seems to settle finally all the worries about metaphysics: he seemed to have rescued God and morality and meaning from the monster skepticism.  But Kant really didn’t solve anything. Like a very good magician, he made the lady disappear (only of course to reappear again somewhere else). Kant is supposed to have settled the problem of metaphysics, but as Oliva Blanchette points out in his Philosophy of Being, he has little to say about being at all.  The one who has made himself judge and jury over the great tradition of metaphysics of almost 2000 years conveniently made sure that tradition could not speak for itself -- let alone with its best arguments. When Stalin treated dissidents this way, they were called “show trials”. As another recent critic has pointed out, it is doubtful that Kant ever read anything of Aristotle, Plato, the mediaeval Christian or Arab or Jewish metaphysicians, which is like basing a critique of western civilization on what one learns from a tour of Grand Rapids. Even if Kant had read thoroughly in the western tradition of metaphysics, evidently he dismissed it as not worth taking seriously.  It would have been very inconvenient for him to have faced the opposing arguments from that tradition (especially St. Thomas’s) in the customary way mediaeval philosophers did. Like many of the early modern philosophers, Kant worked in splendid isolation. 

Kant’s critique of reason was a kind of homage to the physics of Newton. For Kant, real knowledge was only possible by the empirical criteria and scrutiny of physical science. His basic thesis is that the mind cannot get beyond the boundaries of possible experience. But it is well established that the arguments which he brings over and over again to bear in support of his empiricism are themselves a priori ones, that is non-empirical arguments.

Kant’s ethical philosophy is particularly important to Christians and conservatives, who are marked by his influence in many ways. Nietzsche, who called Kant a “catastrophic spider”, thought the Kantian influence on modern Christianity (for which he had only contempt) so deep and pervasive that he compared it to Aristotle’s influence on medieval Christian thought.  If there is one word that denotes the essential nature of modernity it is Autonomy.  Professor Edward Feser (whose books, The Last Superstition and Aquinas and Locke I heartily recommend) has pointed out about Kant’s ethics that the characteristics which the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition attributes to God, that He is “autonomous,” a “self-legislator” (that He follows no law save that which is dictated by His own rational nature) Kant applies to man, because according to Kant, every human being is an end in himself. Our freedom in Kant’s view necessitates our autonomy. Autonomy from what? From any other authority than reason itself. We must, if we are to be free, be self-legislators.  Kant thought, with the rest of the Enlightenment thinkers (I refer you to his Was ist Aufklärung?), that man had finally come of age – grown up – and was ready to be free, to be his own master. That conviction is the foundation of the liberal order that has obtained in Europe and America for 250 years at least.

I want to say just a few words on the very large and difficult subject of Kant’s influence on natural law theory which had a profound influence on conservative thought not just progressive liberal thought.  This influence is largely due, I think, to Kant’s pervasive influence on contemporary Christian thought, Catholic and Protestant.  It has been somewhat puckishly said that “we are all Kantians now”.  It is easy to see this to be largely true in the unconscious Kantianism that characterizes nearly all public moral and political discourse (“conservative” and liberal) in modern western societies.   The natural law theory of most conservatives has been disoriented toward the freedom, rights, and dignity of the human person. I say “disoriented” because it has been the foundation of Christian thought until Kant that our freedom and dignity derives from our fulfillment of the allegiance we owe to God as His creatures in the order of justice. That is, the fulfillment of our nature as given.  It has been understood through most of the Christian centuries that He has ordered us naturally to Himself as the Supreme Good in a hierarchical order of goods from the lowest of the mundane to the Beatific Vision.  This is not to exclude the gratuity of supernatural grace, but only to emphasize that our nature is ordered to Himself by His creative act and thus to His Divine Law, which in our existential experience we know by reason and experience as the natural law.  The natural law as an emphasis in conservative thought withered on the vine, because it would have its natural law theory acceptable in a pluralist public orthodoxy that does not recognize divine authority deluded as it is by Kant’s idealism an his ethics that guarantee of our autonomy. According to the liberal orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of autonomy or self-legislation, our moral obligation begins with a rational assessment of the good without any acknowledgement that every good necessarily has its source – its existence -- in God, the Highest Good Who is Being itself. It was by this mistake, that  much ink was spilled and time wasted by conservatives in their opposition to abortion on a natural rights basis, supposing that such a profound moral and intellectual problem could be solved by a right reading of the constitution or by its amendment!

Alasdair Macintyre has reminded us that liberalism has no use for philosophical debates but to resolve its moral conflicts automatically resorts to the legal system. The result of this inherent proclivity of liberalism is of course a fierce legal activism which conservatives have always deplored, expressing its grave misgivings with judicial review, elitism, and the anti-democratic exercise of “raw judicial power”.  Liberalism has made the overweening courts do the duty of a supreme moral authority, what in a confessional polity would be the Church.  But conservatives have opposed judicial activism with the obverse mistake of judicial positivism. Instead of infusing an alien  (and destructive) ethic into their reading of the constitution like their activist counterparts, “conservative” jurists, like Scalia, Bork, and the late Rehnquist have conducted their constitutional jurisprudence as “strict constructionists” refusing to “impose” any ethical norms from the bench.  But as the Professor of Jurisprudence (Amherst) Hadley Arkes has convincingly argued (some of us did not need convincing) in his book, Constitutional Illusions, constitutional adjudication necessarily involves moral reasoning. Few conservatives have understood the Constitution as anything more than a procedural document.  And while it is certainly that, the constitution certainly implies an ethical view of man and the state, even a theological one. There should be no denying the truth that any operative idea of political authority and obligation or of liberty and natural rights ineluctably involves a theologically grounded ethos of human nature and purpose.  The constitution does not give meaning to its own controlling concepts such as life, liberty, rights equality, equal protection, etc. These morally-loaded concepts Arkes calls “principles of right and wrong that do not depend for their authority on their mention in the Constitution.”   Any meaning of these terms is understood only in an ethos that already obtains in social order.  And if the prevailing orthodoxy of the society is so profoundly disordered from reality, as is apparent all round us, then to make a legal positivist use of the Constitution as protection against the ravages of advanced liberalism is like protecting ourselves from the flood by hiding behind a dike that is cracking up.

Conservatism has been a great champion of natural law often in the name of natural rights (which is not the same thing – unbenounced to many conservative soi-disant spokesmen).  But natural law is a toothless lion, a dead letter, when divorced in conception (as it can never be in reality) from the divine law from which it draws any reality. So divorced, it becomes a thing which, while perhaps “written on our hearts”, has paradoxically no known or knowable author. An orphaned natural law becomes (as it has been for the last 200 years) the plaything of our subjectivism and our rationalism (the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Kant’s practical reason).  As if either reason or will were indefectible.  The rights orientation to natural law is the wrong. Moral obligation is antecedent to moral rights: I have a right to a doctor’s medical attention when I am seriously ill, only because a doctor first has an obligation to heal whenever possible. It is not the other way around ontologically.  If the law did not oblige the doctor, then no “right” to his attention would exist. Allow me to quote the French political philosopher, Pierre Manent (I refer you to his City of Man): “Severed from being, the notion of human rights by itself lacks ontological density. It will irresistibly conquer the political and moral realms since, available and unattached, it can easily be tied to the various experiences of man that all appear capable of being looked at in these terms. . . . [T]here is nothing under the sun . . . that is not susceptible of becoming the occasion and matter of a human right.”

Having insisted that the natural law is founded on the divine law, I am not implying that the natural law is something imposed on us by God, like Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Tablets inscribed by the Hand of God.  That the natural law derives from God, we may be sure. But it is not something we receive extrinsically from divine legislation. Rather it is our nature. In the same way that God made trees to act in a certain way so  did He make man, who then acts – broadly speaking -- according to the inherent propensities of his nature. Hence, the importance of culture and its interaction with the religious nature of man.  For that nature should be naturally expressed in culture in so far as culture expresses – or will, if permitted -- our basic human propensities. The culture of Modernity expresses not the religious nature of man but rather its exclusion, given the grand illusion of modernity that man has no such nature, in fact, that he has no nature – no essential purpose –at all. No civilization founded on such an illusion can long endure.

According to the Aristotelian tradition of metaphysical realism, as adapted and taught by St. Thomas, the Common Doctor of the Church, the nature of a thing is its  form of its existence – what makes it what it is, dog , cat, man --  and thus it is its modus essendi, the way in which it exists. But as we do not make up the finalities or purposes of our existence but act according to a nature, which subsists in an entire order of being, a hierarchy at the summit of which is God Himself, the law of our being is given us, but not extrinsically. The natural law is, rather, the dynamic propensities of our nature as God ordained it, which is, as Frederick Wilhelmsen beautifully phrased it, “an unfolding of treasures written initially like promises within the scroll of being” (here I’ll refer you to his excellent book, Christianity and Political Philosophy).  But man is that privileged being who is not compelled to follow the dictates of his nature.   

To follow the dictates of our nature would mean, as Frederick Wilhelmsen put it, actively “signing” our culture with the marks of the Christian faith, – an application, I might venture to suggest, of Dr. Kirk’s “moral imagination”.  It follows then that for a people to make its religious belief conspicuous is inevitable in a truly free society. It follows in turn that a society that whose essential pluralism so excludes from its public orthodoxy the recognition of transcendent  authority and transcendent reality is not a truly free society. 

Thus, the Church’s relation to Modernity and modern civilization is crucial for conservatives. Because she is presence on earth of Him by Whom all existence came into being, and Who is Light of the world. It should be clear from the Church’s persistence as an intellectual after 2000 years that the idea of Christ as Lumen Gentium is not a mere sentiment to be tucked away for religious uses but no good in politics and economics.  But the Church and her tradition should be important to conservatism’s view of the problem of modernity, from a purely human consideration a well, that the Catholic Church is the last and supreme institution in this world that stands athwart Modernity and truly understands it. Yet even she, to the extent that she is a human institution, has been infected by the contagion of Modernity and many among her members even and especially in those who govern the Church have been benighted by it. The trouble this has brought on us has been incalculable.  A part of my book explores this infection of Catholic theology by modern thought, the effects of which have all but destroyed Catholic tradition.

If (and the question is, of course, purely hypothetical) the Church should lose her way – as conservatism seems to have lost its way – then the intellectual tradition she has fostered and protected and which even so has languished this last century would wither and she with it.   But we have it on good Authority that this will not happen. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean many minds and hearts won’t continue to be lost to a rational apprehension of the good, and, as a consequence, many souls lost. Nor does the divine assurance mean that our civilization won’t fall to ruin as all civilizations must do for they are mortal like human beings that make them.  But the intellectual errors that have produced the culture of modernity are a poison and having drunk deeply of it the west is dying an unnatural death. The alternative to saving it – if it can be saved – is not pretty. We know what happens when civilizational order breaks down. The terrible 4^th, 5^th, 8^th and 9^th centuries were witness to it. And cultural conservatives have been fond of saying since the 1960s that our own era is witnessing the “barbarians at the gates”. Unfortunately, the barbarians are now ruling us. We have no longer the luxury of being “conservative”.  For there is little left to conserve. Our task is rather to restore. And if we take up that task, let us be taught – indeed formed as well informed by-- by the great Catholic tradition by which our great civilization was nurtured.

Thank you