I’ve just finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly and considered it a perversely entertaining read about a disedifying aspect of much of human history—the sheer stubborn stupidity of many political leaders. After quick discussions of Jeroboam, son and successor of King Solomon, and the legend of the Trojan Horse—which likely had some historical foundation, she discussed in some factual detail six Renaissance Popes who were taking care of their families’ wealth and power while ignoring or aggravating the problems which led to the Protestant-Catholic schism, the British botch of their relationships with the North American colonies—all of them though Canada remained part of the Empire until helping to form the Commonwealth and Florida remained part of the British Empire for several more decades, and then the disaster many of us remember too well: the war of the American government against the Vietnamese peoples.
Tuchman seems, to this non-historian, to have carried out a good analysis of each of these disasters before coming to the wrong conclusion, though not a conclusion fully wrong to be sure. She concluded that Johnson and Nixon, for example, represented failures of reasoning, failures in the realm of individual thinking. They could have seen what needed to be done if they had simply engaged in more disciplined (individualistic) reasoning processes. There is a valid insight underlying this but her insight would have been far more valid if she had had a better and more complete abstraction of what it is to be a human being of a higher sort, a civilized sort, or—still better to a Christian—a human being responding to empirical reality in such as way as to shape his own being to the thoughts of God as manifested in Creation.
It is a little surprising that she didn’t come to a more coherent understanding of these follies of political leaders; she does seem to have been a proper admirer of Edmund Burke, a true man of Western Civilization and not a man to slight a well-disciplined human mind but a man with an appreciation of the other aspects of human being, starting with that aspect of the human mind which is formed over generations and cannot be brought into a well-ordered form by the will-full efforts of any one individual or even any one generation. This aspect of the human mind, intellect, was defined well by Jacques Barzun:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand. [The House of Intellect, page 4]
I discussed this subject in the essay: Intelligence vs. Intellect.
We have to deal not only with conscious reason but also with a ingrained practices and habits which correspond to reasoning processes acting over multiple generations. Some are aware of these reasoning processes, though that awareness can mess us up as much as thinking too much about that shot of the basketball or wondering, “Do I breath in as I begin my swing at the tennis ball?” In any case, many in a well-ordered human community will not be aware that many of their `prejudices’ are not given truths but rather capitalized experience which may or may not be valid now or in the future as we learn more or better about God’s thoughts as manifested in Creation. Some may see this lack of full awareness of most human beings as good or bad; I see it as simply the way we are and see the need for each human being to somehow accept their own role and the roles of others, whether that human being is someone unconsciously embedded in a tradition or someone with conscious awareness of a tradition, to defend it or critique it.
Matters get more complicated, at least partly because we have no settled ways of speaking about human being which deal properly with all we know about that human being from our religious and other traditions, from literature and philosophy, from biology and the other sciences (perhaps especially mathematics) which tell us so much about the proper ways to think about the foundational stuff of our being and the being of our world or even all of Creation.
My thoughts about human being began to cohere into a framework which can properly organize our empirical and other knowledge in the spring and summer of 2012 as I was reading E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition and Jacob Neusner’s Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity.
I’ll lead with my conclusion as I can best state it for now: the human being can be usefully and morally described in terms of mind and heart and hands; all three have immediate and individual aspects but also longer-term and communal aspects. The immediate and the individual are not fully the same nor the longer-term and the communal.
As individuals, we can critique the communal beings in which we participate, though we should remember not to play around with explosives unless we know what we are doing. Most of us will not even be aware of the true nature of what I call a worldview; many of us don’t realize that most of what we see as absolute truth and most of what we vaguely realize to be weaker truths are what we could call mediated truths—a worldview which is the capitalized experience of something like a civilization, spiritual experience as well as more strictly empirical experience. To complete this quick view of human knowledge of human being: a civilization is a mortal embodiment, quite imperfect and defective, of the Body of Christ as organisms on Earth have been in some sense mortal embodiments of that perfect man who was Christ after His resurrection. Whether I’m writing about the moral aspects of human being as individuals developing communal being or about the biological aspects of human being as individuals constrained to act in the interests of family-lines, I’m really writing of the evolutionary and developmental processes which lead to the formations of evermore complex individual and communal human beings, ultimately to the Body of Christ and all of His members in Christian belief.
Let me quote a brutally honest statement of Professor Wilson:
Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions — hate, love, guilt, fear, and others — that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths. [E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition, page 3]
Even this statement is wrong, though it’s as correct as any such statement in the greater context of Wilson’s thoughts about the social nature of human beings. We as individual human beings are ourselves and also the members of family-lines in an evolutionary sense, but also members of communities which have formed over time. This expanded view, well developed by Wilson and colleagues in a number of books and articles, adds the `socio’ part of `socio-biology’.
The example I’ll sometimes use to bring out the main point is reproduction, the center of evolutionary reasoning. Having babies and raising babies is expensive in the human species. Our raw biologically founded sexual desires and the pleasures which can result from fulfilling those desires are the ways in which nature encourages us towards ethical behavior in the context of biological organisms. We have babies to continue the family-line and perhaps help it to expand greatly. The value of human life rests first of all upon the animal foundation of natural selection: those family-lines containing members which reproduce successfully might survive into the future—pure luck also plays a role. I suspect natural selection has been misunderstood and feared by many who would protect moral order just because it developed in a period in which our individualistic beings were being aggrandized at the expense of our communal beings. If Darwin had grown up in a Civilization not undergoing a strange form of decay, he would have likely developed his theories in the direction taken since then by Wilson and other sociobiologists. (I believe there are hints of such developments in Darwin’s writings.) If his Christian critics had not been decaying into a state of radical individualism, they would have been able to tie Darwinian ideas into an appreciation of the communal aspects of human being.
Liberal individualism is little more than a secularized form of literalism of a general sort, including Biblical literalism: what is concrete and immediately perceptible is what is real and all else exists only in a nominal sense; moreover what concretely exists is transparent to human thought properly disciplined to the will. (In other essays, I’ve claimed this error has been growing in the West since Duns Scotus and William of Occam and other radical philosophers at Oxford in the 14th century first began their attack upon the traditional Christian understandings of mind and of human being as best refined to that time by St. Thomas Aquinas; those radical philosophers over-glorified the will and led too many to very bad states of thought and feeling and action.)
What we can perceive immediately is indeed a very concrete form of being and is only a starting point, from a metaphysical viewpoint, for analyses which penetrate being, heading deeper into ever more abstract regions of being ending in the level of abstract being which is the raw stuff of Creation, what all the rest is shaped from, the truths manifested by God as sufficient for this Creation including the story He wishes to tell in this concrete world, the story He will continue in the world of the resurrected.
Our individual intelligences operate over short spans, perhaps the length of our own lives though some families and other institutions have leaders who think over longer periods and there are human beings who have a bit of trouble with five minutes from now. Our intellects operate over the spans appropriate to our communities. Our biological urges are more limited in many ways but operate over spans appropriate to our genetic family-lines. We are driven to struggle to survive through famines and wars and horrible diseases, driven to reproduce even when it seems irrational to have children, by our genes in which is encoded, as Professor Wilson wrote, the foundations of not only the subject matter of ethics but also the very beings of ethical philosophers. And so we can see that our feelings and biological urges are less irrational and more in the nature of a sometimes harsh but rationally understandable ethics frozen into our DNA. Our passions are the most immediate part of us, hard for our reason to control even when we know our passions are inappropriately directed, but they serve needs evolved many years ago and are still being refined, as, for example, nerve-cells first evolved hundreds of millions of years ago but are still being reshaped to various purposes in the human brain and the brains of many species.
Life is good, not because it can always be said to be good by human standards but because we are the descendants of those who survived and did well enough to reproduce during good times and bad times. The claim that life is good is clearly only sometimes true but our family lines wouldn’t exist if we didn’t struggle through the bad times as if it be clearly true that life is good but for the current bad stretch. It would seem that God etches some harsh truths on stone tablets and encodes some other harsh truths in our DNA.
Harshness is part of life in this vale of tears, but only part. There are lines of Jewish thinkers and leaders who can see that the goodness of communal human life, family and synagogue and other communities, comes from a properly formed set of feelings and emotions. What evolution gave us for family-line survival can also work to the formation of morally good human communities, from marriages to nations and right to the Body of Christ.
The passion of man for woman, though it can go bad, is also the bond which ties husband to wife in a fruitful and wonderful marriage. (Most human relationships lie probably in a middling position on that spectrum from bad to wonderful; bad can dominate in periods when communities don’t properly form their young men and young women.) This is a short statement of the traditional Jewish viewpoint:
The doctrine of emotions in the view of the sages who created Judaism remained always the same. The reason derives from the social realities that give meaning to emotion and definition to the possibilities of feeling. If we begin with feeling, we end up in society. [Jacob Neusner, Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity, page 51]
A little more discussion can be found in an essay I published in August of 2012: Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?.
For more discussion and a proposed framework for understanding our individual and communal human beings, download my book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.
Let me get back to Tuchman’s criticism of the leaders in Troy, of Jeroboam, of George III and Lord Townshend and various others, of John Foster Dulles and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and many others. She speaks of their failure to use their powers of reasoning properly without seeming to realize that communities are formed precisely by the strengthening of the communal aspects of our human being, by at least a partial submission of the individual aspects of our being. Only a thinker too well-formed to Enlightenment understandings of thought and human being would expect modern politicians, especially those who succeeded in American political machines, to be the rebellious thinkers who belong to the community and yet are willing and able to critique the mind and heart and hands of that community. Even the often courageous and intellectually substantial Winston Churchill had a career of disaster-causing errors redeemed by his bulldog courage, not brilliant policies, when facing the dangers of Nazi Germany. Then, after falling into a cleansing depression when he saw that he and the other leaders of the West had participated in intensifying the ongoing processes of barbarization of the Anglo-American countries in their efforts to fight the freshly barbarized nations of Germany and Russia, Churchill regained the wrong sort of courage and gave his famous iron-wall speech where he pointed into regions where militarists and national security thugs would shape the views of politicians rather than having a communal cleansing by way of return to free societies. Free societies are necessarily formed in morally well-ordered civilizations; at best, barbarian societies are struggling toward a true freedom, despite some silly glorification of ancient German tribal customs.
We still had the military power, the industrial productivity, the scientific knowledge, the political organization, of the most advanced civilization that the human race has yet seen, but we were becoming barbarians even before the process accelerated in the early 1900s as we Anglo-Americans raced the Germanic and Slavic and Japanese and Chinese peoples toward ever lower states of moral order.
The problem is not that Lyndon Johnson didn’t use the full power of his political reasoning to see the nonviability of South Vietnam as an independent country. The problem is that the United States had become a country where the head of state was not in any true sense a citizen of Western Civilization nor even of the United States as defined by the traditions accepted by the Founding Fathers. Lyndon Johnson was a radical individualist who’d been herded together with many of his fellow American individualists and had acted according to his primeval communal instincts but those instincts had never been refined to accord to the better traditions of the West, the legend of King Arthur or the historical reality of the great-souled Charlemagne and the truly great Alfred and the admirable St. Louis. Johnson had all the bad characteristics of Andrew Jackson without the virtues such as his battlefield toughness and willingness to take an unpopular stance. Johnson was the sort of modern American individualist and cynic who would have seen through all false legends and whitewashed biographies of George Washington and would have concluded Washington was simply another scoundrel who’d had better press than most. Johnson would not have had a clue why it was that Washington as a teenager had been so impressed with a stage play about an idealized Cato that he would have set his life’s goal to be as devoted to public duty and public honor as Cato had been. (And Cato was a noble man though missing some of the benevolent virtues which are part of Judaism and Christianity.)
Thinkers of all sorts, including historical analysts, need to be able to step back far enough to see the ways in which the truly great leaders, Cincinnatus and Cato and Benedict and Alfred and George Washington, have shaped themselves in response to reality under the guidance of some noble tradition. Even Otto von Bismarck, that nationalist SOB was cool-headed in his political conspiracies, not vengeful or hateful, and he knew history well enough to know that large wars or constant wars of any size will destroy social order in a country; a war fought for motives of conserving some great good might still lead to revolution and loss of that great good along with much else. He was a man emerging from barbarism and possessed the warrior attitudes of his Germanic ancestors but the same can be said of Charlemagne and even of King St. Louis to some extent.
A society well-ordered to the demands of a noble tradition can produce, if all goes well or at least okay, a body of politicians and other leaders who will reflect some sort of strong order. The conclusion changes not at all when shifted to cover other complex human communities such as the Catholic Church or the various Jewish communities, even a military with a strong tradition of selfless service, such as the American or British or French armed forces. Nearly all of these communities, and many others, are in various stages of moral decay. We need to step back and see that this is the situation: we are barbarians in control of a modern city. Much that seems civilized about us is no more than our ability to somewhat use and crudely maintain complex infrastructure and to still make the clothing of civilized men and even put it on our own bodies without hurting ourselves. We’ve been stripped of that capitalized experience which shows itself yet in the Rule of St. Benedict or the writings of Shakespeare or the letters and speeches of George Washington, a man of more limited mental power than Hamilton and Jefferson and Adams but all the more impressive for his absorption of so much of the political and moral wisdom of the Western tradition, British branch, as it existed in the late 18th century. If we could pause from our pedantic discussions of the Constitution long enough to read Washington’s letters, written as he was holding the future of the rebelling colonies in his hands, we would probably understand much which is beyond the direct reach of our individual thinking powers.
Tuchman seems to have concluded that Dulles and Kennedy and Johnson were something like a George Washington gone wrong. They were nothing of the sort. If anything, the more intelligent of these individualistically best and individualistically brightest could be seen as Jeffersons or Hamiltons unleashed in a West collapsing into moral disorder.
As I already wrote: Johnson, and all the other recent American presidents and most other leaders, were men and women who wouldn’t have had a clue why Washington so admired Cato. They certainly wouldn’t have understood a man I mentioned earlier, one who did rise to a state of high literacy and the highest moral order during a period of barbarism: King Alfred the Great. Johnson and Nixon and all the others were outsiders to the traditions of Western Civilization, the traditions which are manifested in us as intellect defined so well by Barzun and also as feelings and emotions disciplined to higher moral purposes as discussed by Neusner. To the extent that Nixon’s `moral majority’ existed, it was a mob of consumers who knew how to behave well in department stores and steak-houses, not a community bearing the traditions of the West.
It’s been Lord of the Flies time in the West for a good number of generations. Barbarian children ruling over other barbarian children and often exploiting them in ways criminal and immoral.