By the 18th century the British empire no longer mediated divine rule. The ground was breaking down, order was dissolving. The American revolution produced heroic symbols that explicated the existential nature of man in the order of existence as both immanent and transcendent, and consequently a spiritual catastrophe was averted if not a political one. The convergence of the pragmatic and the transcendent in the establishment of the revolutionary movement would provide the ground of the American nation. The nation would function in the pragmatic yet the citizenry would recognize that it did not represent mankind (past, present, and future).
The unfolding of the British Empire revealed it’s telos which colonials found unsuitable. Colonial thinkers had participated in the continuation of differentiated reality and moved far beyond the British paradigm in terms of ‘freedom,’ including a metastatic advance, going so far as to create symbols expressing the ground of ‘freedom.’ Why this noetic advance took place on the fringes of ‘civilization’ is a really interesting question. The answer, I think, is found in the education of these people, their revulsion with imperial order, and the event of the Great Awakening where the American colonials concurred with Lebniz’s comment, “The ultimate reason for things is called God.” (Principes, 7-8).
The first generation of Americans, the ones who sacrificed everything of an immanent nature in the effort to capture the true meaning of existential order, intimately understood the realty of that order they established, and the symbols they created, specifically ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’. As philosophers and in noetic terms these Americans seized the opportunity to seek the divine in a ‘freedom’ that exists from the psyche of being to the horizon of Divine mystery. Those symbols engendered in the founding are only vaguely and imperfectly understood today and readily exchangeable for ‘security’ and ‘rights’ among a people who, in the end, may no longer be worthy heirs of the great sacrifice.
The founding generation eschewed any hypostatizing derailments, particularly the abandonment of the divine communion, and sought to transfer the responsibility as ‘carrier of the order of history’ from the empire to the republican citizen who understood that ‘revelation’ acted as “God’s appeal to man to place himself under his order…”
In historiogenetic terms, the republic has moved so far toward the pragmatic that historical reality is experiencing a Hegelian distortion, exemplified by a ‘progressive’ desire on the part of elements of the elite to move toward ‘empire’ and the perverse influence of foreign ideologies.
I don’t know if America represents a ‘universal mankind under God,” the ancient yearning of empire, best illustrated in contemporary terms by the call to “take democracy to the Middle East.” I don’t think that it does. If we are to survive as a people we must recapture the noetic and pneumatic insights gained during the founding period (e.g. the pneumatic reality of the Great Awakening, the noetic reality of the form of government, etc.) and we must repair the egophanic deformation that has resulted in the collapse of the symbols into the doctrinaire ‘system.’
May 27th, 2010 | 9:36 am
I love you guys on this blog, I really do, but this may be the most goofy, badly-written muddle I’ve ever seen here. Seriously. When I read that “the founding generation eschewed any hypostatizing derailments,” I thought you were trying to pull off a parody. By the time that I read that “historical reality is experiencing a Hegelian distortion” in “historiogenetic terms,” I thought you were just trying to sucker me. But by the time I reached the end — talk of “noetic and pneumatic insights,” and “egophanic deformation” — it became clear that you were the one who has been suckered, Mr. Cheeks. Gee, let’s see how many Voegelinian buzzwords we can squeeze into a single blog post, shall we? At a certain point, I started looking for patterns in the words and letters you used, thinking that the only reason for writing so obscurely would be that you had hidden an acrostic somewhere. No luck finding anything, but for your sake I hope that’s what you were up to.
May 27th, 2010 | 9:44 am
Huh? Jonathan Clark begs to differ.
http://www.amazon.com/English-Society-1660-1832-Religion-Ideology/dp/0521666279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274971391&sr=8-1
May 27th, 2010 | 12:07 pm
Please, ya gotta tell me: Was this a parody? If not, it has to be included in an updated version of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”.
May 27th, 2010 | 12:54 pm
What, precisely, was the need for that, Lil’ Abner?
May 27th, 2010 | 8:50 pm
This has to be a parody. Pitch-perfect, too – the juxtaposition of $5 words with the confusion if “it’s” and “its”.
May 28th, 2010 | 4:49 am
Bob Cheeks says, “Those symbols [freedom and liberty] engendered in the founding are only vaguely and imperfectly understood today and readily exchangeable for ’security’ and ‘rights’ among a people who, in the end, may no longer be worthy heirs of the great sacrifice.”
Perhaps the confusion in this post in not Bob’s but ours.
I have to say that I don’t think this post captures what the spirit of the founding is or was. In spite of our ignorance, and absent the experience of any great awakening, I don’t think the founding can be summarized in Leibniz’s words that the ultimate reason of things in in God.
I don’t think the quid est deus occupied the founders in such a straightforward manner. The attempt at criticizing the marriage of the canon and feudal law (Adams), let alone the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom (Jefferson), or the sheer fact of Roger Williams’ RI and Providence Plantation were all answers to theological questions (or real problems). But I don’t see any of this motivated in terms of attempting differentiate a compacted order with which the colonists (arbitrarily?) found themselves.
However, I don’t see their republican nation building, with its emphasis on the individual citizen, as an egophanic revolt. It may be egophanic if one is truly concerned with discerning with defining or at least understanding what it is or which particular people truly mediates divine rule.
I think the general view of the founding was that such a role of mediation was not to be found amongst human beings. Such a radical separation has its dangerous pragmatism and potential Hegelian distortions. These have been shown throughout American history–one need not only look to the current Iraq war to find evidence. However, there are elements in American history–the real lived lives of Americans from top to bottom–which belie any hypostatization egophantism.
One must look to the (perhaps) overly differentiated content of American life. This mat ultimately be unsatisfying to one seeking a city to which one can call one’s own, but such it is. It leads many to schizophrenia, and the brightest follow Deleuze and Guatarri in terms of making such a disease a science–a schizo-analysis. This should be avoided in terms of a statesmanlike keeping of one’s head, which means pointing out what is true in the American founding and showing what leads to all sorts of perversion. But the tendency toward perversion–hypostasy and gnosticism–will never die. If it did, we would cease to be human.
May 28th, 2010 | 2:47 pm
Hi Robert. Quite a vocabulary you have. You must be really smart.
Too bad your entire argument has been lost by the incessant use of pompous parlance.
But what do I know, I’m just a plebian.
May 28th, 2010 | 5:31 pm
My favorite part of the post definitely is the reference to Lebniz (sic).
May 29th, 2010 | 7:06 am
John Presnall: One of the most brilliant commentaries I have ever read! It will take me weeks to digest this wisdom.
May 29th, 2010 | 2:16 pm
…”why this advance took place on the fringes of civilization”….is the most interesting query.
The Gnostic impulse had met its match. Perfection loses its charms when the imperfect surroundings are so providential…if a tad dangerous and full-bore challenging. When one must create one’s self as new each day…not as a revery but in order to survive, a certain pragmatism breaks out and the simple pleasures are elevated. Such things as one’s own rhythms of breath amidst the background noise of a growling stomach become more important than the patterns of social interaction in the Hindu Kush. Imagine that.
When the role of spectator within a smorgasbord of philodoxic abandon is the primary occupation, clucking sarcasm is elevated to an everyman’s art. Sneering is to be greeted with open arms, at least it is unsurprising.
Parody? Well, it occurs to me that any form of explorative thinking in this self-satisfied, knee-jerk gluttonous age is parody. Let us stand back and throw mud, how satisfying.
Another interesting thing to ponder is the dichotomy of individuals who master their egophanic tendencies living under a system whose dead-reckoning clearly tends toward the egophanic revolt.
The juxtaposition of “security” and “democracy” with “liberty” is exhibit one in the “english as second language” proclivities of this arrogant , incurious age.
May 29th, 2010 | 11:30 pm
It is a constant meditation in my life what it will take to restore basic constitutionalism to public discourse.
At the moment I would say, ‘don’t hold your breath.’
Thank you. Excellent essay.
http://washingtonrebel.typepad.com/washington_rebel/2010/05/freedom-reflections.html
May 30th, 2010 | 3:54 pm
Thanks John for your usual insightful and penetrating analysis. I am, however, maintaining my thesis that the American founding represented a rather unique convergence of the pragmatic and transcendent
and further I’ll argue that the transcendent element succeeded in deeply penetrating not just the elite class but to the very yeomanry, to those that worked the land, which is very porcher of me-let me refer you to the political sermons spoken from the various pulpits during this period. Very simply, the American founding represented a unique example of the possibility of human existence in society-in a condition of maximum freedom- under God. That the founding was as much a spiritual event (an hierophanic outburst) as it was political.
As far as my remarks concerning an “egophanic defomation,” I was not referring to the founding generation, rather the recent past and contemporary times. And, yes I very much agree with your final remarks, which accounts for Polybius’s comments re: cyclical constitutions, where even the ‘mixed’ ones decay as a result of prosperity, which in turn acts to destroy the morality of the people, who in turn
demand more ‘rights’ and ‘entitlements,’ while living the life of a parasite.
Dr. Sabin, brilliantly rendered as always!
To everyone else, thank you for your opinions, criticisms, comments, and editorial assistance, very much appreciated and enjoyed.
May 30th, 2010 | 4:48 pm
[...] Cheeks has a pretty abstruse essay about America’s founding over at Postmodern Conservative. I think Cheeks could have spared [...]
May 30th, 2010 | 4:49 pm
I think Cheeks could have spared his feisty commenters some grief, though, if he’d just said this in the first place instead of posting it in the comments section: “I am, however, maintaining my thesis that the American founding represented a rather unique convergence of the pragmatic and transcendent
and further I’ll argue that the transcendent element succeeded in deeply penetrating not just the elite class but to the very yeomanry, to those that worked the land, which is very porcher of me-let me refer you to the political sermons spoken from the various pulpits during this period. Very simply, the American founding represented a unique example of the possibility of human existence in society-in a condition of maximum freedom- under God. That the founding was as much a spiritual event (an hierophanic outburst) as it was political.”
August 29th, 2010 | 6:28 pm
Through reading the comments I get a sense that this may be a departure from your normal post. I was going to comment that I totally agree that this government of ours has become derailed in relation to what our great country was intended to be,…and along those lines.That being said I will not take that further until I have a chance to read older posts and get a sense of whether this is a blog for me to be reading. I did like how you approached this from what seemed to me the old english way of talking,long winded and eloquent.
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