[This entry is part of a work-in-progress which will deal with the evolution of the human mind as we can see it in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, Albert Einstein, and other great thinkers — an entity capable of shaping itself to empirical reality in such a way that it can draw forth abstract truths which are manifest in that reality.]
I’ve just read The Evolution of Civilizations (reprinted by Liberty Fund which doesn’t seem to have permanent urls for individual books). The author, Carroll Quigley (1910-1977), was a distinguished historian who taught at Georgetown for 30+ years, Princeton and Harvard before that. Quigley was a bit controversial, a rather moderate conspiracy theorist with insider’s information and a high opinion of the “Anglophile network” which was, and maybe still is, trying to bring about a one-world government. So far as I can tell, Professor Quigley differed from the mainstream of modern thinkers more because of his understanding of moderate realism (of which Thomistic existentialism was the most complete form before my efforts to update it) than because of his teaching that there is a group of bankers striving to reorganize the world.
In any case, The Evolution of Civilizations covers the content of an introductory course he taught at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University where diplomats and other foreign affairs professionals were educated. Professor Quigley has many interesting comments upon the processes by which a full-blown civilization develops and then decays — there have only been about 24 verifiable civilizations in history. He speaks of Western Civilization as beginning about 750AD when Europe was pulling out of the Dark Age which followed the collapse of Rome. He goes on to speak of the West going through three stages of expansion (very unusual for a civilization which usually expands once and then moves towards its death by prolonged stages). He labels the three resulting phases of the West as feudalism, commercial capitalism, and industrial capitalism — names carrying political as well as economic meaning. Each of those first two systems began to decay into a static state, foreboding stagnation but the West went on to new creative efforts as new ‘instruments’ (such as insurance brokerages to allow British fleet-owners to trade far and wide) developed to replace older instruments — such as the feudal systems’ local production of nearly all goods. In Quigley’s analysis, creative ‘instruments’ decay eventually to self-serving institutions. He claimed our industrial capitalist instruments had become such self-serving institutions by 1930 or so. If true, this means our current task would be to develop new instruments, if we wish the West to recover once more and move forward, but we can’t really do that consciously though we can aid the process by being flexible and letting go of ways that no longer meet our general needs. The problem, of course, is that current ways provide prestige and wealth to the vest interests, those instruments which have become stagnant and self-serving institutions.
For now, I’m only going to pull from Professor Quigley’s book one idea, the fundamental idea of what he calls the outlook of Western Civilization — moderate realism. Its domination of the human mind was perhaps short-lived, he indicates perhaps the 50 years following the death of Aquinas, say 1275-1325 or so. And, yet, as I’ll explain later, moderate realism survived as what might be labeled the principle of modern science, in which category I’d place all disciplined ways of thought which accept reality. In the words of Professor Quigley, moderate realism is the outlook defined (loosely) by:
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
This worldview was, and is, diametrically opposed to various forms of idealism and dualism, views which can be illustrated by Platonism and Pythagorism and the early thoughts of Aristotle. There are various modern ism’s that are idealistic and dualistic. In fact, nearly all organized systems of thought are idealistic and dualistic. Moderate realism is unique in its basic willingness to be shaped by responses to reality and Thomism reached a highpoint of sorts by the teachings of Aquinas on the importance of the act-of-being, his existentialism, and by his teachings on the formation of the human mind and moral nature by way of responses to environments. Under Thomism, or even less complete systems of moderate realism, philosophers and even theologians to some extent pay at least as much attention to sensory perception, to empirical data, as does a farmer or a road-builder. Under Thomism, there is no clear divide between the work of theologians and philosophers and physicists, not because theologians or philosophers can dictate to physicists, but because they each have important ways of dealing with empirical data and penetrating more deeply into being and into the meaning of Creation and its various phases and parts. In this unified way of approaching God’s unified Creation, we can see the truth of one of the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas:
We know even God through His effects in Creation.
From this point on, I’ll assume my updated understanding of Thomistic existentialism, which was itself a great expansion and ‘updating’ of the moderate realism developed by pre-Thomistic thinkers such as St. Augustine of Hippo. Unless I refer directly to Professor Quigley, the claims and analyses are my own. I’ll also note that I’ve claimed in earlier entries that Jamesian pragmatism shares some important elements with Thomism or — more generally, moderate realism — in that knowledge is properly acquired from sensory data but the building up to greater structures can’t proceed properly because no such structures, such as the ultimate of a world, are assumed even tentatively. (See What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism.)
I’ll illustrate the conflicts between moderate realism and other ways of thought by referring to a somewhat vague but important belief system –the American belief that our ways are inherently superior to all other ways, past or present. The two aspects of this belief are:
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Dualism: There’s American ways and there’s inferior ways.
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Idealism: American ways represent virtue and goodness and we can know that without the trouble of emprical investigation of reality.
In fact, reality has had a dream-like quality in the minds of Americans from at least the early 1800s. Tocqueville noted (circa 1838) that Americans had the odd trait of ignoring facts which were in conflict with the American mainstream view of matters. It is odd that so many attacks upon civilian targets in our wars can be ignored while some Americans babble on about American GIs handing out chocolate bars to children, perhaps the wounded survivors of our last bombing mission.
We can come to a better understanding of the problem by considering the claims of the novelist Hermann Melville that the so-called philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau is a spiritualized materialism which is morally insane (a need to justify the self at the expense of charity and also of true piety is a major part of the thought of Emerson and Thoreau) and Melville feared that this moral insanity was a part of the American character. That moral insanity depends upon dualism and idealism to isolate the self from objective reality and its often inconvenient facts so that we Americans can see ourselves as pure no matter what we actually do.
This sort of self-justification in moral matters isn’t allowed in moderate realism and neither is the myth-making that imposes our preferences upon physical reality over the ugly facts of evolution or the difficult to understand theories of modern physics. As Professor Quigley sees matters, correctly in my opinion, the scientific method is basically the way in which an adherent of moderate realism would explore empirical reality. Recent events would indicate that even bankers and business managers, certainly economists, in the United States pay little attention to reality. Some of President Bush’s advisers are said to advocate the idea that ‘power’ can overcome reality. Bush himself seems to believe that noble intentions and a good opinion of oneself can somehow negate the objective evil one does. No wonder we’re decaying so rapidly, the good and bad parts of the West alike, though I’d fear our war-machines will take longer to decline than our social or economic institutions.
Quigley wrote that, quite plausibly, the instruments of our capitalist economy had become self-serving institutions by 1930 or so. His deep and prolonged efforts to understand the meaning of his vast historical knowledge led him to believe that such a problem can be overcome by either the destruction of existing institutions in such a way that fresher instruments can grow up or perhaps by the growth of instruments alongside difficult-to-erase institutions. So far there’s little sign that such growth of new instruments is occurring but the early stages might be hard to discern. What bothers me is that the commitment of the West to moderate realism is very weak, even in the ranks of Catholic theologians and philosophers and clergymen, and practically non-existent in the United States which is now the dominant political entity in Western Civilization. The United States seems to be leading the West on some death-march into Lalaland.
Philosophy and theology matter in our day-to-day affairs, but there’s a tricky point here. Plato knew that a philosophy dictated a way of life but, believing in an idealistic and dualistic way of truth, believing in a realm of the truly real which could be reached only by a great effort of a large-souled and probably large-minded man, he preached a separation from concrete reality. And he preached a sort of idealism which would have no corresponding ‘outlook’ that would make sense to most men and would help them engage the real-world successfully. Let me repeat Professor Quigley’s words:
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
I’ll take Professor Quigley’s term ‘outlook’ as being the way in which our community, however defined, views created reality and also transcendent reality. An outlook is then a more concrete version of what I call a worldview which is a more speculative way of tying together our understanding of all realms of reality. Using this terminology, we can say that the average baker from Western Civilization should have a coherent outlook in which he has been formed over his years of schooling and working and playing and living in a family and church community and other communities. Theologians and philosophers, some historians and literary scholars, some scientists and politicians, should have a more sophisticated version of that outlook, a worldview. Over the history of the West, there’s generally been a separation of outlook and worldview as one or the other develops faster or deforms faster, but they should be largely synchronized. In recent centuries, it would seem that the outlook of practical men advanced further and to more sophisticated understandings of reality than did the worldview of philosophers and theologians. To a certain extent, scientists began to take up that outlook and separate themselves from more disciplined forms of speculation, though we must always remember that much of the work of both Newton and Einstein began as philosophical speculation before the mathematical work began.
I’d argue that the West was unique in having a synchronized outlook and worldview just because the respect which the likes of St. Jerome and St. Augustine and especially St. Thomas Aquinas had for the data of the senses, for the manifestation of divinely instituted truths in mere matter, made it possible for men of the West to make sense of what goes on in a morally well-ordered marketplace and also what goes on inside the head of an Einstein and — perhaps surprisingly — to at least talk coherently about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This, of course, assumes that there is truth manifest in the real world as opposed to idealisms that, in their pure form, teach of realms of truth separate from concrete reality. The historical truth is more complex, but this isn’t the place or time to deal with those complexities, nor have I researched them properly or thought them through.
There have been important changes in adherence to moderate realism by various groups in the West, accounting in part for the strangeness of Western intellectual history and perhaps for our more recent practical problems. Catholic thinkers in particular seem to have separated themselves from the mainstream of Western thought was still quite fertile in confronting reality and reaching to profound and abstract depths of understanding. With my light-weight knowledge of history, I placed the Catholic falling-away at the time of the Renaissance but that might have been more a falling-away of priestly instruments as they decayed into institutions because Etienne Gilson places a general falling-away of Catholic thinkers at the time of the French Revolution when the Catholic inability to deal respectfully and intelligently with Enlightenment thought reached some sort of a crisis point.
Catholic thinkers may have been reluctant to deal with unfolding truth just because they were educated in and employed by instruments of the Church, and of Western Civilization, which had decayed into self-serving institutions. One possibly clear example comes early in the modern era when Galileo’s feisty relationship with the Jesuits, some were bitter opponents and some respectful opponents and many were supporters of one degree or another. Suddenly, Jesuits who had supported his ideas shut up as did those who had supported him personally as one who might be in error but should be allowed to work. Stillman Drake, the great biographer and translator of Galileo, says that it was likely the Superior General of the Jesuits sent out an order that Aristotle and his writings were to be defended at all costs, not God and the Bible but Aristotle and his writings. The Jesuits may have reformed themselves after that, but they’d at least flirted with an institutionalization of their own order, a corruption into a stagnant form that served established teachings rather than a search for truth.
Moderate realism shares with its child, physical science, an awareness that its specific forms are contingent and time-bound but the truth is revealed over time by some sort of communal process, even one so strange as modern scientists at Oxford or Cambridge dressing up in Medieval robes for a debate about the nature of space and time. St. Augustine’s rejection of the idea that the human race had transmuted from another species was a terrible error and one that led to a specific version of the doctrine of original sin which is still taught by the Catholic Church alongside Her more recent admission that evolution has occurred. There is a deep incoherence here that is detected even by young Christians with minds poorly formed by our modern educational systems. As strange as some might think this statement, Darwin’s work was the necessary response to a thousand year-old wrongful conjecture which had became a caricature of an absolute truth. In simpler terms, Darwin corrected a major error in the thoughts of St. Augustine. This shows the power that a great thinker can have over the intellectual development of a civilization, in his inexcusable errors as well as his better thought. I’d also haveto believe it was the incompetence of Catholic thinkers in dealing with this situation which brought on the anti-Christian attitudes and words of many adherents of evolutionary biology.
Still, there has been a general movement towards some greater body of truth, though often by way of conflicts which were quite avoidable. That is:
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
As the West has turned away from moderate realism, the so-far successful project of the Christian West to understand what God is saying in the Bible and also in Creation is decaying into various superstitious and immoral endeavors, in political and technological realms as well as in religious and philosophical realms. I think the loss of respect for the nature of relationship between the human mind and God’s Creation is already endangering the viability of the physical sciences and other fields of empirical research and analysis as self-sustaining projects, though the decay of optimism and openmindedness in empirical research is well behind the advanced state of decay in philosophy and theology. The decay seems still more advanced in politics and economics.
Much has been lost and more is being lost. It’s sad and it can, in principle, be avoided by a civilization founded upon the idea that we should openly accept and deal with empirical reality, a civilization founded upon a worldview of Thomistic existentialism or an outlook of moderate realism. After all, truth is seen as unfolding rather than as being manifest in any particular forms of knowledge or any specific political practices or forms of production of food and artifacts. Formed to look at history as being an unfolding of truth, men of the West could move into the future confident that old truths can be better understood, new truths discovered, better ways found to care for ourselves and our children.
What we in the West need to recover first and foremost is an understanding of the wisdom in Quigley’s claim:
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Acts of Being » Blog Archive » Wrongful Formation of Minds: A Case Study of Sorts
[…] of moderate realism: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” (See Ways of Thought in the MOdern West for a discussion of Professor Quigley’s views and their relevance to our current situation […]
Acts of Being » Blog Archive » Knowing Truth in a World Where We Perceive What is Useful
[…] Ways of Thought in the Modern West, I discussed the views of the historian Carroll Quigley who summarized the fundamental Christian […]
Acts of Being » Blog Archive » The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding
[…] forms of economic organization were found so that West could return to a robust health — see Ways of Thought in the Modern West. Those collapses don’t seem to me to have been brought on by decay processes, though there […]