The Library of Law and Liberty website has another interesting article, this time dealing with some of the thoughts of the American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray. In this article, ‘The True Sage of Woodstock’, Richard Reinsch writes:
How can reasonable men and women reclaim equality over and above egalitarianism? The first principled step is to get right with our compromised Declaration of Independence. This Declaration both affirms equality in self-government and reconciles our deeply contrasting Lockeanism and Calvinist Christianity as the basis of our liberty. This is an American Thomism of sorts, a reconciliation of seemingly opposed principles on the head of deliberative republicanism. It’s probably our best hope.
I recently confessed to believe, along with Michael Oakeshott, that it’s misleading and can be dangerous to think a stable political system can be well-founded for a nation by documents such as the Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution—see Conservative Politics in light of Evolutionary and Developmental Processes. The general view expressed in that title, the thought of Oakeshott is still more powerful after being merged with the thought of the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, will play a role in the rest of this essay.
From a slightly different perspective, I’ve asked Why We Can’t Build or Rebuild the Countries of Other Peoples and concluded we can’t though we Christians are bound to offer from our plenty help to those in need.
A nation, established as the United States is now or emerging as it was in the decades around 1800 and for a while after, needs some sort of rules for its political, justice, and economic systems. And more. But the argument Oakeshott made throughout his career as a political philosopher, and most certainly my Darwinistically and Christologically expanded version of the argument, claims we can’t impose those sorts of rules upon, say, a cluster of human communities which reside in the same area. Even if those human communities seem to an outsider to have very similar cultures, as is true of Afghanistan to the western eyes, there might not even be any such rules acceptable to most of those communities, partly because they are communities and not just groupings of individuals but perhaps because the environments and the developed state of those communities aren’t appropriate for stable, larger-scale political or justice or economic systems.
Reinsch’s article is largely an appreciation of the political thought of the American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray who believed strongly in the formal political structures developed by the American Founding Fathers. Murray is quoted in the article as saying: “Civilization is formed by men locked together in argument.”
What happens when those men locked in arguments about meaningful matters have a different view of what the world is? Christians believe in a Creation, a work of the God of Jesus Christ, a world with moral purpose in its workings and its goals. Pagans might believe in a world of eternal return, a world perhaps itself rational and perhaps not. Utilitarians, to be a bit simplistic, believe the world to be merely a place of things which might be useful to our efforts to attain pleasure rather than pain. Far worse are those in the Modern Age, indeed they are found in all ages of men, who seek a rather more vulgar form of pleasure than Bentham and his followers would have ever allowed.
Argument too easily becomes combat, at first in words and then maybe with guns and knives and bombs. This happened even between the supporters of the Stewart’s ideas of royal government and the opposing, initially unorganized, ideas of the non-conformists. Eventually, those ideas came together in the Cromwellian Republic with its respect for some ideas similar to those of the American Founding Fathers, ideas which proved to be somehow consistent with brutal massacres of Irishmen and Highland Scots. In any case, the followers of the Stewarts and the followers of Cromwell would seem to have more in common in understanding of the world than do modern Christians and many of our opponents. How can we Christians have rational arguments with them? How can they have rational arguments with us?
There is a lack of common beliefs, and the possibilities of violence, in our arguments over such matters as abortion. Moreover, most Christians seem to think like modern secularists though they insist they can do so and come to traditional Christian doctrines, at which point we see their thinking is no more than assertions linked to ideas pushed into their heads perhaps in Sunday School or CCD. These Christians provide information-theoretic arguments to support a contention that a fertilized egg-cell is human. They appeal to squeamishness and sentimentality with grotesque images for those, including probably themselves, who can’t hold a moral belief unless violations of that belief produce disgusting results and great pain for some creature. We need a Kantian categorical imperative against abortion rather than the traditional Christian teachings that “what might be human should be treated as human” and “human creatures belong to God in a special way because He has claimed us in that special way and not because we’re inherently God-like.”
Let me go on, though the situation would seem hopeless to a man examining our current mess through Christian eyes if that man were bereft of Christian hope and a strong enough faith in the goodness of God to carry him through some nastiness in this concrete realm of Creation. Let’s recover a reason for hope and a way of showing our faith in God to be consistent with the empirical reality which is this concrete realm of God’s Creation. In other words, let us have confidence in God as Creator. More on that later.
Reinsch describes Murray’s `American Proposition’ in these terms:
Its components are human dignity, constitutionalism, government limited by law as given to America by the common law tradition, self-government as faith in citizens to exercise the duties of moral judgment in basic political decisions, and the constitutional consensus that forms the Proposition and serves as the basis for rational argument and the compromises that it forges. This is the deep background that enables “the deliberate sense of the community” effectuated by our republican institutions to be reasonable.
One interesting aspect of Murray’s thoughts in this area is his insight that political associations differ “from associations like the employer-employee relationship, voluntary associations, or married family life where `the forces of life itself’ define the association more than reason. Rather, the essence of the political association `is its rational deliberative quality, its dependence for its permanent cohesiveness on argument among men.'”
I’d say he’s as wrong in this claim as is anyone who thinks human nature can be split into only one of its aspects, mind and heart and hands. We can’t believe those with bloated and undisciplined hearts by a misunderstanding of mind. What can be said about a man can be said about a human community which is each of its members in the large. Each of us, however non-political we might think to be, is the entire polity in the small and the polity is each of us in the large, our minds and our hearts and our hands.
Yet, there is a sense in which Murray is right in associating political systems to the mind in a special way. Traditional thinkers would have claimed he was positing an ideal. I would say he was foreseeing a future development of human political systems or, as I have been claiming recently, political organs in the Body of Christ.
Political systems in this mortal realm are, in a strong sense, more mind than heart or even hands, but are not such in their ultimate development nor in their original states. In an essay I published in 2010, Freedom and Structure in Human Life — As Go the Immune System and Neurological System, I wrote:
Analogies can be taken too far and too literally, yet I wonder if we can apply to the human social organism, ultimately the Body of Christ, the example of a long-ago and primitive immune system ‘spinning off’ a neurological system. As I understand this particular line of speculation in evolutionary biology, and it was years ago that I read about it, that primitive immune system was largely a set of cells which tried to distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’, between what was supposed to be inside that particular organism and what was an invader. Somehow, that effort to distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ led to a central nervous system, ultimately thought, as well as to defenses against diseases.
I also proposed this as an important question for Christians:
Government as we know it has grown out of systems to identify unfriendly or alien human beings (or sometimes to subjugate the other) or to protect against non-human dangers to the physical and moral aspects of our communities. As we mature towards the Body of Christ, is our government going to split into a policing (immunological) system which operates with some independence but under conditions where it has only as many resources as it needs for the task at hand and a planning and thinking (neurological) system which plays a role in the ongoing functions of the parts of the Body but also plays a central role in understanding the environment of that Body and planning for the future?
I don’t know the answer to that question and think that some future Christian thinker might propose an alternate and more meaningful question about the ultimate state of the political organs in the Body of Christ. In any case, it’s time for Christians to relearn the art of Christian thinking, an art which can lead to a truly Christian understanding of Creation and to a refounding of a Christian civilization, whether it’s based in the West or in Asia or on the Pacific Rim. We have to recover the confidence in God in His role of Creator which is expressed in the philosophical school of moderate realism whose true nature was expressed well by the historian Carroll Quigley as “Truth emerges in time through a communal process” and expanded by me to “The human mind develops in time through a communal process.” Once, if imperfectly and incompletely, the Western mind, at least the minds of Aquinas and Shakespeare and Newton, were encapsulations of some understanding of this world, and more, and those encapsulations were images of some major part of Western Civilization as it developed. There’s still more: I’ve claimed that Western Civilization is the most complete embryonic Body of Christ we’ve yet seen. It might be dying and might come back to live in some other region, perhaps Asia or the Pacific Rim, but the pilgrim Body of Christ will live and we will know it by its strongly Christian understanding of created being.
Developments which emerge in time can be expressed in written documents, but those words on paper can only provide a snapshot of the emerging and developing and evolving entities. Any efforts to stick with those documents as the Body of Christ matures, or as history moves forward—in non-Christian terms, will lead to a nation no longer holding a plausible understanding of itself, no longer having a plausible way to order its political activities. Yet, the origins of the political organs of the Body of Christ are still with us. Deflected from healthy development, those organs will yet recognize the alien, whether the European Jews of the 1930s or the Leftist radicals of the 1950s (even the anti-Stalinists) or the Islamists of the 21st century. Even domestic police might get into the act, waging war first against violent and brutally exploitive drug-lords and then against everyone who pops a pill or smokes a joint as they waged war against everyone who drank a beer or a martini not so many decades back. There remains yet the possibility that American Christians will get some of the treatment that some of them are advocating for those Islamists.
We’re a long way from having the sort of political organs which can show mind-like attributes, at least on a consistent basis. For now those mind-like attributes seem almost like a strange dream in the midst of a West which is lost in the Cosmos as Walker Percy said. Until those mind-like attributes develop at the communal level, rational argument at the individual level will be sporadic and marginal, not even to be found at many universities from what I read and hear. The opposite is also true: until individuals are capable or and willing to engage in rational argument, the mind-like attributes will show sporadically and in marginal ways in our communities. We’re not dealing with simple systems with easily stated cause-and-effect relationships but rather with the sorts of complex systems which mathematicians and biologists and political scientists and others have only recently begun to study.
And so I return to a more fundamental level to claim that rational argument doesn’t bind together a civilization and certainly doesn’t form it. A common story of what exists, of Creation in Christian terms, binds peoples together in a civilization, an embryonic Body of Christ, most of which have miscarried. Human beings, individual and communal, can adopt the story, learn to live by the story, and develop together. Rational argument can exist within that story and perhaps between those who hold differing stories.
Rational argument about meaningful matters between different groups isn’t even possible unless those groups already share at least some version of the story and stories underlying a large-scale, `multi-cultural’ community. Even if multiple civilizations come to exist, they will inter-communicate on rational terms only to the extent that they produce men like the old-fashioned Jesuit missionaries, St. Francis Xavier and companions, who were able and willing to embed themselves in the ways of another civilization while holding on to their Christian faith.
Rather than trying to lead a return to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, rather than compromising their own faith in the interests of moralistic campaigns, American Christians should get to work on figuring out how to live the Christian life, in their minds and their hearts and their hands, in this age decaying into barbarism. I’m doing my part by trying to produce what I call a worldview, an understanding of our world and of all of Creation in light of Christian revelations. My efforts will produce something good to the extent, and only to the extent, they are part of a greater communal effort, an effort of businessmen and musicians and artists, of scientists and poets and spiritual leaders, of engineers and house-builders and retailers.