I would note a couple of complications for the Front Porch discussion of Strauss in relation to an Alternative Tradition in America. Discussion of these complications might help to clarify what, if anything stable and substantial, is really at stake between a Front Porch and a Pomocon position (assuming these are or can be made coherent bodies of thought).
Man’s antagonism towards nature was not an invention of modernity. Nor was his sense of alienation from his concrete, local community, his human city on a human scale. Leo Strauss knew this — it might indeed have been the main thing he knew — but I gather he wanted to be friends with Christian Natural Law types, so he mostly lays this thesis between the lines: the First Wave of Modernity is … Christianity. (So add “1” to all the other waves.) It is Christian universalism and individualism that irreversibly complicate the Front Porch project, long before these longings evoked by the Bible were reconceived as a project of human autosalvation.
Fortunately, though there is a powerful logic leading from each of the first three waves to the next, we are not permitted to believe in the inevitability of the ongoing slide down the slope. Otherwise, why was Strauss writing? Or, for that matter, why Tocqueville’s “Legislative” efforts, Tocqueville who understood the boundless slipperiness of equality, but found his duty and even his nobility or greatness in affirming a choice of a decent and just, though very imperfect democracy.
There is no such thing as pure modernity. Pure modernity is Nietzsche (Nietzsche is the pure Machiavelli), and Nietzsche is not, finally coherent — his passion to combine the nobility of Caesar with the compassion of Christ could only be sought by actually following Christ, and this I take it he could not consider. All modernity is adulterated, and the American Founding is so in an especially blessed way. The American Founding is already an Alternative Tradition, and every Alternative Tradition is adulterated. There is no pure theory of practice, either modern or “alternative.” Liberalism is indeed parasitic, and it is indeed very much morally depleted — no disagreement there on my part – yes, and shameless, pornographic, all that no doubt, too. But a wise “alternative” would have to be… yes, parasitic on liberalism (or on its roots in Christian universalism and alienation), too.
(On the question of natural depletion – the ecological question – I take Prof. Deneen’s concerns very seriously, though I may see a little more truth in the Lockean assertion or wager that much material value is in human labor and invention. But it is certainly true that the technological mindset is structurally blind to the good of wholes, even the whole human body. In any case, I believe the threats to our moral-spiritual-familial ecology are the most urgent. Or perhaps I’m just not smart enough o work on both problems at once.)
Thus I have already publicly raised the question whether “The Tocquevillean Moment is Over” — by which I mean the moment of trying to preserve felicitous religious and localist contaminations within liberalism without directly confronting the theory or notions of liberalism (self-interest well understood and all that). Does this post-Tocquevillean question move me towards the Front Porch?
Maybe this is where I differ from my more purely localist-traditionalist friends, and where I think I am not only, admittedly, more “Straussian” than they, but also, I think, more Tocquevillean: liberal individualism is partly true, and very American, and therefore irreversible short of some catastrophe it makes no sense to wish for. To contain and moderate this partial liberal truth it is necessary first to acknowledge it, otherwise we make enemies faster than we do friends. At the same time, liberalism obviously is not the whole truth – far from it. And to re-enthrone an “alternative” understanding that for our Founders was so firm that it could remain largely implicit, namely, that a good human existence, a truly humane existence, requires acknowledgement of “sacred limits” (Strauss) to individual self-expression, and therefore some shared horizon that is essentially religious, however general, that is, to re-enthrone “virtue,” this is a philosophical-political project, a kind of regime re-founding that cannot be defended or pursued by the via negativa of resisting federal incursions and praising family farms (which I think I like). We cannot break the compulsive grip of individualization/centralization except by confronting the understanding of the good from which it springs. (This of course does not mean constructing an alternative Pure Theory of the Good.) Lincoln was right about this at least: public opinion is everything, and I see no hope for our country short of a sea change in public opinion. I don’t know just how or even whether such a change is possible, but I am convinced that “all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat” against this compulsive grip of extreme secular liberalism.
I have enjoyed addressing a word to your Front Porch. And now you can tell me if I’m right about where we agree and disagree.
July 11th, 2009 | 4:47 pm
Thanks to Ralph for raising the level of our discussion several paygrades and for finally connecting his teaching style to my learning style.
July 11th, 2009 | 5:45 pm
Peter, will the multiple pay raises be added to my check automatically, or is there some paperwork I must fill out?
July 11th, 2009 | 8:11 pm
Ralph, splendid & scintillating. A query, with a leading prolepsis: since Christianity is not adequately defined by universality and the individual, isn’t there room for the local (to use my sect, which is one of the older ones around: the parish & the diocese) and the national? In other words, might Christianity be the paradigm for both Porchers & PMCs?
July 12th, 2009 | 12:37 am
Very nicely put, and very similar to my own thoughts while reading the original posts. But as long as we’re counting modernisms, isn’t Modernism Wave Zero really… Judaism? Monotheism is the original universal creed that disrupts and displaces the localized traditions preceding it. Right?
July 12th, 2009 | 8:10 am
Dr. Hancock, I very much enjoyed the essay above. I believe you are correct in writing, “We cannot break the compulsive grip of individualization/centralization except by confronting the understanding of the good from which it springs.”
You and others have explicated that the current condition is the result of a perversion/distortion of the”good.” Also, I’m familiar with Dr. Voegelin’s wisdom in his comment, “In turning away from the ground man turns away from his own self; thus, alienation is a withdrawal from the humanity that is constituted by the tension toward the ground,” thus, leaving man alienated from God and ‘good’ men.
All of which indicates that “something” has to be restored/recaptured in order to bring society back into “order.” However, you write, “I don’t know just how or even whether such a change is possible, but I am convinced that “all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat” against this compulsive grip of extreme secular liberalism.”
That’s not very encouraging!
We have philosophers for a reason. I suggest that ‘now,’ today is one of those times when those true philosophers, not the philodoxers, stick their necks out and address not only the ‘what’ but the ‘why’ and ‘how’ we’re going to get out of this mess; even if it means a short ride in a small tumbril.
I am reminded, that in modernity, a courageous little, Catholic-Jewish-nun-philosopher was required to pay the ultimate price for the truth….and did so with a prayer in her heart.
July 12th, 2009 | 8:35 am
Dr. Hancock, I very much enjoyed the essay above. I believe you are correct in writing, “We cannot break the compulsive grip of individualization/centralization except by confronting the understanding of the good from which it springs.”
You and others have explicated that the current condition is the result of a perversion/distortion of the”good.” Also, I’m familiar with Dr. Voegelin’s wisdom in his comment, “In turning away from the ground man turns away from his own self; thus, alienation is a withdrawal from the humanity that is constituted by the tension toward the ground,” thus, leaving man alienated from God and ‘good’ men.
All of which indicates that “something” has to be restored/recaptured in order to bring society back into “order.” However, you write, “I don’t know just how or even whether such a change is possible, but I am convinced that “all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat” against this compulsive grip of extreme secular liberalism.”
That’s not very encouraging!
We have philosophers for a reason. I suggest that ‘now,’ today, is one of those times when those true philosophers, not the philodoxers, stick their necks out and address not only the ‘what’ but the ‘why’ and ‘how’ we’re going to get out of this mess; even if it means a short ride in a small tumbril.
I am reminded, that in modernity, a courageous little, Catholic-Jewish-nun-philosopher was required to pay the ultimate price for the truth….and did so with a prayer in her heart.
July 12th, 2009 | 12:03 pm
Really great post, Ralph. Pat’s reading of the Three Waves suffers, I think, because in cutting Christianity out of the picture he ends up with an overly monolithic account of modernity (and with a somewhat one dimensional Strauss). Strauss seems to intend his waves as a kind of playful Hegelianism–he gives us a picture of what interconnected philosophical episodes looks like without surrendering the process to History–the chain of succession only appears inexorable upon retrospective analysis, if then. There is a serious question here regarding what can account for the vulnerability of Christianity to modern appropriation: if Brague is right that the modern sequestering of the normative from the divine is already implicit (if not actualized) in the Christian bifurcation between practical law and divinity then it seems ripe for its absorption into modern categories. In other words, the wave before the first wave might be Christianity’s own unstable interpretation of autonomy. Or, of course, Brague might be wrong on this count.
Paul’s suggestion is a serious one—the latest papal encyclical tries to recognize the way modern technology and globalization are products of our inhererent inclination towards “being more” or what Delsol has discusssed as “aspiration” while also focusing on the principle of subsidiarity, a kind of localism, as the proper mechanism for the expression of this unique human freedom. Delsol often discusses this in Augustinian terms–realizing the Pauline spiritual unity of the human race but also the limitations on its political realization given the infirmity of our nature. One can say that Christianity is ambiguously or problematically political without charging it with complete a-politicality.
July 15th, 2009 | 11:01 am
I think if we want to get nit-picky about wave numbering, then we’d have to raise things even further, as there were “Modernities” (as it were) before the Christians came along. Cf. Lucretius.
July 25th, 2009 | 2:00 am
I have no earthly idea what you could possibly be arguing in this “essay.” Utter gobbledygook. And that you refer to Nietzsche as “pure modernity” leads me to believe that you haven’t actually read a page of his work. “Pure modernity,” is that what your priest told you Nietzsche was?
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