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More Thoughts on Christianity and Post-Christianity
Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 11:11 AM
Peter Lawler

So I was more than a bit astonished to see the web attention given to my previous post on David Bentley Hart’s book. I didn’t know that my “screed” would require James’s spirited defense, and I certainly didn’t know I was accusing metaphysical Mormons or Humeans of being immoral. I thought the point of being a Humean was knowing that morality was merely conventional, and that secular Christianity might hang on as merely custom or prejudice, given that our dependence on such is inevitable. I’m certainly not certain that Nietzsche is right about Christianity; I do think Hart too uncritically agrees with him. So my Hart post below was more an intellectual experiment than anything definitive, and I’m following that experiment with another:

The pre-Christian world was cruel and capricious–Hart reminds us forcefully of the torture and murder it tolerated as a matter of course–precisely because it regarded particular persons as unreal. The truth was best seen by the philosopher who became dead to himself, who resigned himself to the ephemeral insignificance of his particular existence. Christianity was, in a way, the slave revolt Nietzsche described, a “cosmic rebellion” against the enslavement of each of us to natural and political necessity.

Christ freed us from the limitations of our merely biological natures through his perfect reconciliation of the nature of God and the nature of man. He was, the Nicene church fathers concluded, fully God and fully man, and his incarnation and victory over death divinized every man. So he freed each of us for unlimited love for every other person made in God’s image, and he was the foundation for a virtuous way of life based on “a vision of the good without precedent in pagan society.” Charity to all—both to friends and especially strangers–became the virtue most in accord with the truth about who we are. For Hart, the wonder is that anyone could have imagined the ideals of the Christian faith, given that they have so little support in any pre-Christian conception of who we are.

It is barely too strong to say that, according to Hart, Christ freed each of us from being nobody to being somebody–a being of infinite value. None of us has the destiny of being a slave, and death has been overcome for each of us. We are no longer defined by our merely biological natures because our nature is now to be both human and divine. From one view, there is no empirically verifiable evidence that death has been overcome for each particular divinized man. From another, the evidence is the unprecedented virtue flowing from unconditional or unconditioned love–love undistorted by the miserable, selfish perception of mortality– present among the early Christians, and that virtue’s indirect, historical transformation of the broader social and political world. The change in who each of us is caused by Christ deepened human consciousness. It made the inward existence of each us more profound and more mysterious through the presence of divinity in every nook and cranny of our natures.

Every feature of the personal liberation praised by our new atheists and our liberal intellectual sophisticates first came into the world in Christian communities. Even the Stoics didn’t approach the Christians in their indifference to a person’s social station. The Christians were the first to be completely opposed to slavery, for the raising of women to equality in marriage and elsewhere, for faithful loyalty in monogamous marriage, and for the brotherhood of men. For the Christians, the community of love wasn’t some otherworldly hope; it was formed by fulfilling the obligations of divinized beings here and now. Hell didn’t refer to some otherworldly, legalistic punishment but what we experience whenever we reject God’s love and the truth about who we are as persons created in his image . Our divinization through Christ includes what’s called life after death, but we can live lovingly liberated from death even before we die.

So Hart should make more clear than he does that he affirms much of what’s called modern social and political progress in the direction of the liberation of women, the complete abolition of slavery and serfdom, the reduction in the number of lives tied to degrading mere subsistence, the new births of freedom made possible through technology, the erosion of unjust distinctions rooted in conventional hierarchies, and even the affirmation of universal human rights. The modern abolitionists and the fervent partisans of civil rights, Hart repeatedly mentions, were either Christian or consciously inspired by Christianity. Liberty without love, he would add, is an illusion or at least a distortion, but there’s no denying that modern political liberation was often inspired by a love for free beings, as well as love of being a free being.

A big difference, it should go without saying, between Hart and Nietzsche, is that he doesn’t hate the modern world insofar as it is a Christian accomplishment, and there’s ennobling truth in the egalitarianism of our secular Christianity, even if it’s far from the whole truth. The effects Christianity has on political life, Hart shows persuasively, are always incomplete and compromised. That was true of the Roman empire, imperial Christendom, and the British and American empires. The polis or nation or empire can be influenced and chastened by the presence of Christian community, but always against its own grain. Political life, Hart’s view seem to be, is unworthy of divinized beings and part of our true liberation is from its “inherent violence.” For him, it was a tragedy that the church, as an institution, ever played a role in political life or assumed responsibility for national or imperial unity–and so he has little nostalgia for the comprehensive dream that was imperial Christendom. Much of his book is a description of “the history of a constant struggle between the power of the gospel to alter and shape society and the power of the state to absorb every useful institution into itself.” He should have made more clear that the modern separation of the nation from the church–in, for example, the American case–can’t be regarded as some tragedy for the church, as long as the gospel retained some influence in forming free beings. The tragedy, of course, was the nation’s eventual successful liberation from that limiting or chastening influence, a liberation, he should have said,surely least complete in America.


The Banality Kerfuffle
Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 9:08 AM
James Poulos

I woke up to discover that more or less everything I wanted to say last night about Ron Rosenbaum’s misbegotten hit job on Hannah Arendt and her conception of the banality of evil has been said this morning at length by Steven Menashi at the American Scene. (Extra fun: in touching on Carlin Romano’s recent hit job on Heidegger, Menashi makes the point which I noted had gone entirely unmade in the long, hysterical combox criticism aimed at Romano: even Strauss, Heidegger’s great foe, insisted we couldn’t wave him away. This is relevant even for those who think Strauss and Heidegger were merely the Spy vs. Spy of Nietzscheans.)

So, since Steve has done most of the talking for me, I’ll let — who else? — Rieff do the rest:

…when the human lowers itself in the vertical of authority, there is always the shock of the revelation that that lowering can scarcely be called animal. Such lowerings as went under the category of sin or transgression were beneath baseness. They were nothing. Hannah Arendt calls this nothing the ‘banality of evil.’ And she is correct, so long as one understands the nothing of banality, its meaninglessness. It is the kind of transgression which the transgressor cannot recognize as a transgression. So the human, as transgressor, once the very idea of transgression is repressed, has fallen through the bottom of sacred order (Crisis of the Officer Class, 161-62).


Prospects for Secularists
Monday, November 2, 2009, 10:09 AM
James Poulos

Over at Secular Right, David Hume has words for our PAL:

Though the author of Atheist Delusions is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, Lawler reports that his criticism of the New Atheists starts from a Nietzschian perspective. All I have to say is that homey don’t play that game. Friedrich Nietzsche was the product of a line of Lutherans pastors, so it should not surprise that his atheism engages so directly, and inverts so forcefully, the thrust of Christianity. As philosophy goes much of what Nietzsche had to say was captivating, but then I also find science fiction captivating, as well as some portions of the Bible.

The atheism of Nietzsche plays on the terms of Christianity, and that is why Christians often admire his work. It is entirely intelligible to them insofar as it operates in the same universe of morals, albeit characterized by inversions. So naturally Christians castigate atheists who are not Nietzschians, such a stance creates much greater difficulty in fashioning rhetorical thrusts. Too many presuppositions simply are not aligned. Where Lawler and many others declare that Christianity is a necessary precondition of humane values, I simply assert that humane values, or more accurately the values we hold today, used Christianity, as well as other religions and philosophies, as cultural vessels. Morality and ethics existed prior to religion, and the emergence of “Higher Religions” which fused a moral sense with supernatural intuitions was a process which occurred in the light of history [DH's bold]. It was no miracle, and may even have been inevitable once humans reached a particular level of organization.

Of course this sort of argument leaves many loose ends hanging. So be it. Those who believe that they have the Ultimate answer do not, and yet we continue to muddle on.

In comments, he states further that

i’m just really tired of christians telling me what i should believe [ditto] if i’m not going to be a christian.

The passage in which Hume thinks Lawler told him what he should believe seems to be this:

Nietzsche was right that secular Christianity or Christianity without Christ is unsustainable, and that the sentimental preferences of the new atheists are no more than that.

Now, I am all for religious/secular understanding, but I think Lawler’s key word, “unsustainable,” was really not intended at all to apply to individuals. At the level of the individual — that is, of at least some individuals — secular morality of the sort associated with Christianity minus Christ (and God, etc.) is often quite sustainable. Clearly even Nietzsche conceded that the sentimental bluestockings of the world — to use Nietzsche’s language — could carry on in fine post-Christian ethical style for a good long while: either until a world-historical poop-out at the exhausted and enervated end of history, or until some ruddier race or tribe came along and wiped Mr. and Ms. Well-Adjusted Secular Bourgeois into the dustbin of history that Machiavelli associated with the once-flourishing but now forgotten Etruscans.

The broader issue is that smart political theologists have always conceded the same point: there is always a more or less small number of individuals who are able to live pretty well on Earth without recourse to religion. Usually this has been on account of philosophy; but the idea developed that the philosopher could not secure the good life for the many without taking away their liberty. So a project emerged aimed at extending a reasonably good life to the many without imposing either religious or philosophical authority upon them. As far as this political project is concerned, the stakes are high indeed; the number of secularists who are content to secure a good life for themselves while consigning the rest of their fellow man to ignorance and false consciousness seems fixed at a lower level than the number of secularists who can secure a good life for themselves. In brief, ethically humanist secularists have to find it impossible to live well as self-realized parasites on a social order with religious foundations. The internal logic of their morality requires a mission, however incremental, to bring the good (secular) life to the masses.

Secularists of a more Nietzschean persuasion, of course, might find exactly this realization the very condition of possibility for living well. (Cesare Borgia as Pope — is he understood?) Hume’s assertion that our ‘religious phase’ may have been the “inevitable” precondition or ‘vessel’ of secular morality (it isn’t clear whether he means naturally or historically inevitable) can’t get the ethical humanist secularist around the more haunting question of whether the secular political project of mass ethical secularism is viable, much less sustainable — especially if that social order is not to be grounded in philosophy, and especially if the politics in question must, as apparently it must, be one grounded in rights to freedoms.


Strauss, Rieff, and Tocqueville: What’s at Stake in the Fate of America Debate
Thursday, October 29, 2009, 11:06 AM
James Poulos

The collapse of sacred order in Europe during the World Wars left many of Europe’s surviving Jewish intellectuals to stake their theory and practice on the future of the United States and Israel. Communism, of course, opened its arms to secular Jews from the outset, but fascism tormented the Jews with the ultimate in gentile oppression: not even renouncing the Jewish faith could save them. So even Jewish intellectuals who flirted, or more, with communist ideology could recognize that secularism alone could not necessarily preserve social order. (Not incidentally, this is to assume that the Nazi regime was so radically transgressive, right down to its foundations, that it did not count as a social order. It had to be thought of as an anti-order.) It’s from this perspective that we can see why Jewish thinkers as a group wound up in an ambiguous position when it comes to understanding the relation between sacred order and social order. Where a Leon Kass came to admit that the supremely moral and bourgeois generation of his parents, in its merely secular grounding, was too weak to withstand the destabilizing questions posed by the counterculture and the destructive answers of the anticulture, an Irving Kristol, by contrast, sought to pile up the evidence and draw out the logic that would show even secular Jews (or gentiles) why their bourgeois morality could and should be defended against the radicalism and nihilism of the ’60s and ’70s.

Looming behind both Kass and Kristol are three titanic figures — Leo Strauss, Philip Rieff, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Strauss, a man whom Rieff would call an “ex-Jew,” remarked upon Tocqueville about as sparingly as did Rieff himself. But Jewish intellectuals driven to admit that the fate of America, not Europe, had to concern them most — and both Rieff and Strauss did this — had to make two momentous decisions about democracy in America. First, either Tocqueville’s insights and prophecies were still accurate in late 20th-century America, or they were not; second, if they were accurate, what was to be done to preserve the American order?

Straussians in basic agreement with Kristol answer yes to the first question. Though no great critics of Plato, pro-Tocquevillian Straussians must concede that Tocqueville’s vision of democratic despotism significantly qualifies or steps beyond Plato’s judgment that democracy must degenerate into tyranny because democratic souls are unable to save themselves from succumbing to the tyranny of desire. In short, Plato teaches that social order is ultimately untenable in democracies because too many democratic individuals slip too far into a love of transgression that comes to rule their souls. For Tocqueville, quite differently, only in aristocratic ages do individuals really allow debauchery and decadence to rule their lives. Democratic individuals are too busy, too equal, too distracted, too conflicted, and not wealthy enough by far to become de Sades. Not great transgression but great quietude will destroy democratic social order; rather than a fury of bad behavior, the democratic individual will slip into a fugue of comfort, surrounding himself in bourgeois self-satisfaction with handpicked friends and family. In Tocqueville’s dystopia, history will die whispering, not banging. Soft despotism will appear to perfect democratic social order; but it will sap the springs of true human greatness in such a way that democratic social order will fade or euthanize itself, to be replaced by something like the “oriental despotism” of China or Egypt, an anti-order of servitude, ignorance, forgetfulness, and anonymity. Our recognizably human character will be smudged away.

Rieff takes a different view. He is clear that Tocqueville — who showed clearly enough that America will forever be without the “officer class” required to authoritatively maintain sacred and social order — is wrong about the way we live today. Rather than enclosing ourselves in solipsistic and quietly gratifying boutique relationships, we create complex strategic distances between ourselves and our supposed intimates. Where Tocqueville’s American readily reposes in committed relationships, Rieff’s American hops from relationship to relationship, alternating between ‘therapies’ of commitment and decommitment that reveal all commitments to be at bottom merely temporarily useful performances. Where Tocqueville’s American is ever more gentle in his mores, Rieff’s American revels in the primacy of possibility unleashed by charismatic transgression. Instead of quietude, Rieff prophesies a new barbarism, truly barbaric because we will lose the ability even to recognize ourselves as barbarians. But Rieff goes on to note that even democratic barbarism pulls us downward into an equality of boredom. Where Nietzsche can’t quite accept the possibility that the aristocratic barbarism of the “blond beast” has been historically foreclosed, Rieff suggests that democratization spells the end of barbarism as a force for creative destruction. Barbaric democrats will bore themselves, and one another, to death. Perhaps Tocqueville’s and Rieff’s dystopias converge after all: but you’d only know it reading from Rieff to Tocqueville, and not the other way around. And Rieff pulls no punches in prophesizing the bloody lengths to which barbaric democrats will go in a final, fatal effort not to be bored.

In sum, Rieff teaches that the greatest danger to American social order is the democratization of transgression. Tocqueville teaches that the greatest danger is the triumph of quietude. We can’t fully understand neoconservatism unless it’s situated within the tension between Rieff’s and Tocqueville’s American dystopias. Rieff and the neocons both railed against America’s cultural decline in the late 20th century. But because the neocons are more Tocquevillian than Rieff, they feared cultural collapse because they thought it would lead to the kind of quietude that reconciles democratic individuals to despotism. And to the extent that neocons are students of Strauss, they recognize that despotism is the worst of regimes because despots seek to destroy the possibility of philosophy. (A global despotism, as Strauss warned in his exchange with Kojeve, would aspire to eliminate philosophy forever from the whole face of the Earth.) Suddenly the difference between Jewish philosophers who make the preservation of the Jewish faith central — like Rieff — and Jewish philosophers who don’t — like Strauss — becomes essential. Rieff sees the preservation of social order as a task which requires, but is fundamentally beyond the competence of, politics. So does Strauss — but Rieff turns to Moses while Strauss turns to Plato. America, of course, puts Rieff and Strauss in a compromised position: neither Hobbesian nor Platonic rule are viable in a natural-born democracy. In consequence, Rieff’s sociology of the sacred shifts away from politics in a way that Strauss’s philosophy does not. Rieff is unafraid to politicize the culture war — there being, in his judgment, no other way to resist the colonization of the law by the anticulture. But Straussians who turn to Tocqueville to try to understand the best way to preserve philosophy in democratic times conclude that the American people must be focused on productivity in economic life and political participation in significant long-term projects. Otherwise, they will slip into quietude, despotism will come to rule, and all will be lost.

Or so I would like to preface the remarks which touched off these thoughts — Dan McCarthy’s recent appraisal of Irving Kristol and his legacy:

Irving Kristol was an intelligent, reasonably decent man whose hysteria about the counterculture led him to champion policies that have crippled the dollar and given the country no-win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [...] Neoconservatism has become a set of attitudes that might be summed up as, “somewhere, shaggy kids might be having sex or smoking dope—so let’s cut interest rates and invade Iraq!”


Statements in Revision…
Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 11:48 AM
Jonathan Jones

In thinking through Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and my position as a “conservative” Catholic sympathetic to our friends on the Porch, I’d like to throw this out there for some opinion. Lyotard (“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives”) has concluded:

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept for the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.

Is the reconciliation of “postmodern conservatism” (a thought on the term here and a succinct summary from Peter Lawler here) something like this: postmodernism rejects the grand narratives of “liberalism” (autonomy, individualism, the elevation of Progress) as well as collectivism (fascism, socialism, Communism) – see here an argument for possible commonalities of “totality” – while grounding itself in a metaphysical “masternarrative,” one of divine intervention and humanity. The differences spring from the assumption that human beings – sinful and lacking in knowledge – at their best make provisional statements about the world, statements constantly subject to revision due to circumstance.


Have a Very Scary Solstice
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 7:14 PM
Will Wilson

Rick Brookhiser at NRO chimes into an ongoing discussion of horror fiction:

One way to think of Lovecraft is as a demented anticipation of Russell Kirk. Kirk praised the permanent things. The permanent things in Lovecraft are revolting monsters from outer space or undersea who, it turns out, have been here for eons, and sometimes have interbred with us. Connecting with the past in Kirk guides and inspires us. Connecting with the past in Lovecraft makes us lose our minds. Lovecraft is a good read, but would you go up the sea beach at Tarawa for that conservative position? Neither would I.

“The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!… Look away… Go back… Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses… That cursed, that damnable pit… Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!”


Nu-Paganism Watch
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 4:29 PM
Will Wilson

Exciting news from the Bayside City Council elections:

the Queens Tribune reported that a conservative Republican was running a strong race in the 19th district and had a chance to win in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. But this was a conservative Republican with a difference: Dan Halloran is the spiritual leader of a local pagan group that worships Norse gods.

What’s the difference? Odin-worship just screams ‘conservative’ to me! Just look at the role model; I mean, you’ve got hanging from the world tree pierced by a spear (fiscal responsibility), plucking out an eye at the Well of Urd to gain wisdom (good education policy), not to mention rituals in which eight groups of eight animals were hanged on eight consecutive days, culminating with the hanging of eight innocent men on the eighth day (tough on crime).

Furthermore, we are told, Halloran is a real Odinist, not one of those sissy neo-Wiccans that you meet in head shops. Look:

When Halloran founded New Normandy seven years ago, he was looking for something much more formal and traditional. Sancio describes it as “definitely on the historically accurate end of the spectrum.”

…

Sancio and Bloch say that the ritual of “blot” can involve sacrificing a valued object, but sometimes it involves killing an animal. Bloch stresses that this happens only “on very rare occasions, and when it’s done, it’s done by someone who knows what they’re doing.” Bloch likens it to Kosher or Halal butchering. The animal — usually a lamb, pig or chicken — is subsequently roasted and consumed. Bloch calls it “a kind of sacral barbecue.”

Sometimes killing an animal? Wait a second! This doesn’t sound like any Odin-worship that I’ve ever heard of!

Odin, the chief god of the Norse, was associated with death by hanging, and a possible practice of Odinic sacrifice by strangling has some archeological support in the existence of bodies perfectly preserved by the acid of the Jutland (later taken over by the Daner people) peatbogs, into which they were cast after having been strangled.

Behold the Nu-Paganism! It’s like Eros lo volt, but with more tea-candles and some period garb. I’m reminded once again of this exchange from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods:

“… My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word ‘Easter’ means. Would you happen to know?”

The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, “I don’t know about any of that Christian stuff. I’m a pagan.”

…

“And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?”

“Worship?”

“That’s right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up the household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk?”

Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, “The female principle. It’s an empowerment thing. You know?”

“Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?”

“She’s the goddess within us all,” said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. “She doesn’t need a name.”

“Ah, … so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she said. “We don’t do any of that stuff you were saying.”

…

“There,” said Wednesday, “is one who ‘does not have the faith and will not have the fun,’ Chesterton. Pagan indeed.

Somewhere, the students of Hampden College are slowly shaking their heads with dismay.


Postmodern Reflections on the Inevitability of Our Post-Christian Thought
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 9:10 AM
Peter Lawler

So I’m reading the brilliant and provocative ATHEISTIC DELUSIONS: THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION AND ITS FASHIONABLE ENEMIES by David Bentley Hart. It begins as a criticism of the naive stupidity of the “new atheists” such as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett from the perspective of the older atheist Nietzsche. The new atheists criticize religion (or basically Christianity) from an anti-cruelty, pro-dignity, pro-rights, pro-enlightenment perspective. They don’t realize that their humane values are, in fact, parasitic on Christianity and make no sense outside the Christian insight–completely unsupported by modern or Darwinian science–concerning the uniqueness and irreplacability of every human person. Nietzsche was right that secular Christianity or Christianity without Christ is unsustainable, and that the sentimental preferences of the new atheists are no more than that.

But Hart also suggests that the Christian insight persists in our claims for autonomy or liberty or unlimited willfulness and even in our nihilism (or our view that what we’re given by nature and tradition is nothing if not transformed or unredeemed). Those claims, too, are unsupported by contemporary evolutionary science or neuroscience. So what amount to our empirical claims about who we are as free beings remain decisively Christian and in opposition to what we think we know through natural science. Modern science characteristically has nothing to say about the free, loving, relational being who is capable of being a scientist. The being with logos, we can see with our own eyes, is a person.

So Hart is right to hit the new atheists hard with the Heideggerian criticism of the vulgarity of their materialism. They cowardly avoid the question of being, of why is there is being rather than nothing at all, or of even why scientists or other free persons could come into being in a world eternally and wholly explained by an impersonal materialism (even or especially the evolutionists assume that this sort of explain has been and will always be true). Our creation by a personal Creator explains better human freedom, love, and creativity–especially artistic (in the broadest sense) creativity–better than assuming the eternity of matter and material causation or, of course, just begging off what might be the most important question for beings open to the truth about who they are. Atheistic materialists can’t explain the Christian revolution in our self-understanding about who we are and its effects on human history. Even the Nietzschean theory that Christianity was little more than expression of resentment about who we are (and the other animals don’t resent who they are!) can’t explain the marvelous and unprecedented monuments to the loving creativity of Christians.

Nietzsche wanted to get us over Christianity, and one criticism of his thought is that he wasn’t anti-Christian enough. Certainly he couldn’t purge himself of his whiny side about the abyss and all, and he, too, arguably attributed too much significance to human creativity. There might be some philosophers–such as Strauss and the later and more Buddhist Heidegger–who worked harder or more consistently in getting us beyond our claims for autonomy and/or being unique and irreplaceable. Are they engaged in mission impossible? Or are they our true scientists? What would be the moral and political consequences of their triumph?

Hart’s view is actually that our true alternatives are orthodox (meaning Orthodox) Christianity or nothing.I actually think he’s wrong on this, because the ground of our freedom in our (merely human) natures is evident to anyone who sees with his or her own eyes. (The openness and longing of the natural human person for a personal God is fact we can perceive without revelation, in my view.) And Hart’s idea that Christ divinized us or made us like him–somehow both human and divine in a wholly reconciled way–misconceives who we are even from a Christian–meaning Augustinian and especially Thomistic–view. Nietzsche, radically orthodox Christian thinkers of a certain kind (including most MacIntryreans), and our fundamentalists all agree on this Christianity or nothing theme. There must be a lot to it, although, again, I finally don’t agree.

Hart’s view seems to be the Aristotelian, impersonal, fatalistic, melancholic natural account of who we are was true until Christ transformed but divinizing us. My view is that it never was completely true, and that the personal logos of the early church fathers has been more true as long as there have been human beings around on this planet. Hart speculates, I thnk with good reason, that the Christian insight that we are meant to be more than slaves informed the emergence of modern, liberating, unsterile or not merely contemplative science. For that reason alone, our Porcher friends might be open to the thought that modern science is about more than nihilistic “mastery.” There might be something unironically charitable about the impetus of modern science, although it goes wrong, of course, with the thought that we need to be liberated from who we are our loving, relational beings.

It’s easy to connect these thoughts to Ivan the K’s fine WEEKLY STANDARD article linked below. Our technocrats are all sentimental Christians without Christ, but unlike our true Savior they’re focused primarily on using their freedom to alleviate their own suffering. Our cultural libertarianism is turning out to be terrible for the unique and irreplaceable beings who are genuinely most vulnerable.

These thoughs are also crucial for pro-lifers: Robert George, for example, takes the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every human person as a rational being according to nature as being scientific self-evident or not depending on a distinctively Christian insight. Both Hart and I disagree, although for somewhat different reasons. My view is that the Christian insight about our personal freedom doesn’t depend on orthodox (or Orthodox) Christianity to be empirically validated, although the whole truth and significance about that insight is best explained by reflection on Christian revelation. So Robby ought to be more about criticizing Locke, Kant, and even Lincoln for distorting or not properly understanding the freedom they describe–the freedom of the loving, relational being. And he ought not to think that Aristotle helps him out much at all.


This Day In Paradox
Monday, October 26, 2009, 9:27 AM
James Poulos

How long before someone makes the argument that the government has to deal drugs in order to afford the medicine Americans need? The libertarian rejoinder that we can and should decriminalize pot without nationalizing health care shows more intellectual promise than popular support. And too many libertarians, I think, fantasize in the closet about a world in which big government and big business partner to deliver everyone safe recreational drugs at a price every American can afford.


Premonitions of Populism
Monday, October 26, 2009, 9:20 AM
James Poulos

George Will on Michele Bachmann:

Looking toward 2012, she is not drawn merely to Sarah Palin or other darlings of social conservatives. She certainly is one of those, but she knows that economic hardship and government elephantiasis now trump other issues.

Indeed, but what’s really of interest is the way Bachmann points toward a post-Palin style of “rogue” conservative populism. Palin’s downfall was her inability to interface well with handlers — especially her own handlers. Ultimately, Palin’s need for handlers is to blame. The instinctive retort is that, without handlers, the aspiring politico of today will live and die in attention-starved obscurity. But this is a trick put on by the system, an idiosyncratic emergent property of a concatenation of circumstances. It too shall pass. Imagine if Palin had done her homework first. Eventually, possibly soon, a post-Palin rogue Republican will emerge who will turn the tables on the handling class in American politics. Possibly their candidacy will be a failure. But George W. Bush’s candidacy, which was a success, failed hugely to tap into anything at all roguish in the popular soul, and it burned him for both terms in office. Sometimes folksy Presidents get an iron grip on their handlers. Sometimes they don’t. Here’s betting the next one will — for good or for ill, and probably both.

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