Back to the Stone Age III: Natural Men A
I have been arguing for decades that any conservative point of view, to be usable or even defensible, has to be grounded in an understanding of human nature derived from observation of man's nature and history. In an age where a Church may dictate morality, this understanding may be less necessary, though it must be said that Thomas Aquinas' arguments are rooted in Aristotle's methods and observations. Whatever the justification Christians may once have had for ignoring the material realities of the big-brained apes that we live among and are, the Darwinian revolution consigned all that rubbishy speculations to the dustbin.
Liberal and Leftist revolutions, while their ultimate purpose is to eliminate our love for our Creator, are devoted directly to destroying first our understanding of nature and the natural necessities of human existence and then to warping and redesigning our very nature. Marxism, feminism, homosexualism, and environmentalism all have this in common, a hatred of man as he is made both as natural being and in the image of God and a contempt for the objective that stares us in the face and blocks our every attempt to reinvent the human species as something other than what it is.
In this chapter, therefore, I propose both to go over some of my old arguments advanced first in The Politics of Human Nature and then in The Morality of Everyday Life and to introduce some of my more recent reflections contained in my never-ending work that I am not entitling The Cities of Man. I shall begin by stealing a few pages from chapter two of the new work, some bits of which may have been put on this website some months or years ago.
Philosophers since Socrates and Plato have been rather too prone to submit all human traditions to skeptical analysis, sometimes in the name of a scientific investigation of nature but more often out of a desire to subject human nature to the categories of a set of rational preconceptions. Since Descartes, in particular, moral and political philosophers have turned away from ordinary human experience and drawn up moral codes and political schemes that seem more like Aristophanes’ Nephelococcygia (Cuckoos-in-the-Clouds) than any human polity. Classical liberals wanted to eliminate or attenuate formal social classes, established religion, and irrational bonds of kinship; Marxists would abolish property and economic distinction; more recent radicals want to banish sexual differences and to subject the family to governmental control. The goal of all these projectors was a rationally designed society controlled by the state and based on principles of perfect justice without regard for personal ties or historical tradition. This ambitious objective, however, has remained largely unrealized. Men, good and bad, still pursue wealth and power. Even incompetent and negligent parents typically love their children, and though fewer and fewer men and women in the West are getting married, the institution is far from extinct.
The persistence of our primitive passions even in postmodern conditions should come as no surprise. The human race is old, not, perhaps, when measured either sub specie aeternitatis or by cosmic time or geological ages, but rather old nonetheless. If we can believe the palaeo-anthropologists, some creature like Homo sapiens has been around for about 120,000 years. If there are roughly 3 generations per century and something like 3000, per hundred thousand years, then the 15 or so generations since the Renaissance represent .5% of the generations of the past 120,000 years or, in terms of total years, our culture represents about .4% of human history.
The experience of Homo sapiens, as long as it is, constitutes only a small part of the story. Man has been a work in progress for some time: Homo erectus, a species with a brain highly developed enough for speech, emerged about 1.8 million years ago. As a percentage of 1.8 million, 500 ends up as 0.000 on the primitive calculator I started with, and we have not even considered the careers of more ape-like predecessors. From this perspective, our little experiment in rational living in no particular time or place almost disappears from sight, and the facts of love and hate appear as inescapable as the doom that overtakes the heroes of Thomas Hardy’s novels.
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I note that our Lord, after each act of speaking His creation into existence, proclaims that act and the creation which comes of it to be good, save for man made in the image of the Triune God; thereupon there is no "it is good." We must wait, eons later, for our Lord, bloodied and dying on the cross, to proclaim, "It is finished!" In Him, it is finished; and in His blood and in His body, broken for us, it becomes good. In His love, He is patient and long-suffering with the fallen creature made in His image; unlike the revolutionaries who want to overthrow the created order, He completes His good work in the very fallenness of the created order, delighting in making something eternally good and beautiful out of the corner stone which the builders rejected and which those "builders" would, if they could, pound to powder. The revolutionaries would burn the wheat to eliminate the tares; they would slay the sheep to rid themselves of the goats; and the worst of them would burn the wheat and slay the sheep because they have come to loathe them, seeing good as evil and evil as good, in the way and image of "their father."
I suspect mankind's next oh so slow of necessity evolutionary step incrementally, will be signaled by his willingness to accept myth / religion without his either having to believe it is history or losing subsequently his acceptance as well of a Creator who actualizes (without necessarily the need for anyone's words) as an unmoved mover who was not necessarily created Himself. For to hold onto any myth or religion as if history is in (sad) effect subconsciously a denial of both the human / natural world as well as a denial of the divine. This should be taught and the corner stone of anything calling itself by the name 'religion' which is otherwise at root a mask for the untempered subconscious or conscious natural will to power. Otherwise we inherit an immature charade out which emerge one way or the other the unnecessary and exaggerated ills we bear yet ongoing... If the divine is in silent relationship absolutely with all of creation at some point mankind will realize it's deafening. So I agree with Dr. Fleming, in other 'words'.
'Rational living': that's the whole problem. There will always be love and hatred as long as human nature will be as it is, and those who want to change society on rational grounds, or to alter human nature itself, never seem to take that into account, or at least didn't for a long time. When they finally came to recognise it, they tried either to psychoanalyze it or turn it over to therapeutic counselors of some kind. In other words, they tried to rationalise it!
So far as they have tried to deal with these emotions, it has only been when they could see some rational basis for them: someone loves their child or hates somebody who harmed them or one of theirs. But then there is the kind of love that is unaccountable, with which they really can't deal at all. This they think insane, or at least a little silly, since they see no rational basis for it, not recognising that their may be some purpose in the world for it.
There will always be unaccountable love, and irrational hatred. And while hatred can be irrationally destructive, it can also be a from of self-preservation. Unaccountable love can be a form of redemption as as often as it can be self-destructive.
These things, among others, the social reformers cannot deal with, at least not successfully, in their mental-rational little worlds they inhabit in their own heads.
That's also why, no matter how rational the pattern they would try to impose on society, human greed, ambition, irresponsibility, irrationality, and just downright incompetence and stupidity will always either destroy it outright, or else will corrupt it beyond redemption. And that's when they are lucky and don't have to face extreme drought, barbarian invasion, especially of the Hun-Mongol-Avar-Turk variety, major earthquake in important areas, or the stray asteroid or comet. The town drunk or the village idiot could have told them this, if only they had had enough sense to ask before they started off on their grand plans for the rest of us.
Perhaps all this is also why rationalist utopians cannot accept the message of Christian redemption. It is based on a love that is indeed rational in one sense, but in another it really does seem unaccountable, and thus seems to make no sense at all. So it must be removed from the picture.
Allen you know Aristotle pointed that out 2,400 years ago. Because it's a world of opposites love / hate , the rational always has to inevitably and always will contain some part of the irrational ... or it's not 'rational' but something much more irrational 'posing' as if 'rational' or some sophistry. I'm sure Tom knows all that, he seems to understand Aristotle. So that certainly is a redemption so far as understanding here and the divine are such.
Thanks for the responses. I'll try to move beyond generalities in succeeding posts and concentrate on two aspects of human nature, which can be described as the power of Love or Eros that brings together opposites and unifies diversities, and the power of Hate or conflict or competition that pushes individuals and groups to assert themselves either aggressively or in self-defense against others. These forces are complementary rather than antagonistic, and human society is impossible unless both are taken into consideration and given proper respect.
Dr. Fleming’s statement, “Philosophers since Socrates and Plato have been rather too prone to submit all human traditions to skeptical analysis,” sent me looking for a similar observation by John Henry Newman that I encountered years ago. Here it is, from “An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent”:
“Of the two, I would rather have to maintain that we ought to begin with believing everything that is offered to our acceptance, than that it is our duty to doubt of everything. The former, indeed, seems the true way of learning. In that case, we soon discover and discard what is contradictory to itself; and error having always some portion of truth in it, and the truth having a reality which error has not, we may expect, that when there is an honest purpose and fair talents, we shall somehow make our way forward, the error falling off from the mind, and the truth developing and occupying it.”
I have learned, actually through my twin vices of arrogance and stupidity, to avoid dichotomies, most of them being false in the domains of the theological and the intellectual. I have, in short, learned to tolerate ambiguities, because as a creature, a fallen one at that, I do not have the intellectual and spiritual capacity to reconcile the poles of a seeming dichotomy on the one hand nor do I have the ability to discern which of them is true. A case in point in my benighted idiom of the Christian faith, Southern Baptist, is the resurgence of the Arminian and Calvinist undercurrents which swirled among Anabaptists and then found their way into American General Baptists and finally into Southern Baptist. It is clear to me that the human creature has some form of agency on the one hand but that the Creator is Providence, the Eternal I Am on the other. Beyond that realization, however, which is an outcome of reason used, I believe, properly as a gift, I can only faith my way through the paradox or seeming ambiguity. The Arminians and the Calvinists in forcing a stand on agency versus Providence have put faith aside and abused reason, creating between themselves an unnecessary friction and animosity. Right now, in the Louisiana Baptist Convention, heads of divinity schools are being fired for being too Calvinist and not Arminian enough. It has now become a point of contention among the local churches in which folks are beginning to pick sides, although few of them actually understand what an Arminian or Calvinist is. I was just last week asked where I stood. I responded by saying that reason indicates that there is indeed an ambiguity which I, a creature, can barely apprehended but much less comprehend as a paradox of agency versus Providence; but where reason cannot tread, faith humbly walks with the assurance that our Lord knows what He has created and what He is doing.
Dr. Fleming's last post is an echo of Ecclesiastes 3:1-11:
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth? I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."
"I have, in short, learned to tolerate ambiguities, because as a creature, a fallen one at that, I do not have the intellectual and spiritual capacity to reconcile the poles of a seeming dichotomy on the one hand nor do I have the ability to discern which of them is true." (end quote)
'We should see what we ourselves are most prone to (each of us has different natural tendencies). Now this will be clear from the pleasure and pain we get. ... However it is clear that the mean is always praiseworthy, but at times we should lean toward the excess, at other times to the deficiency. In this way we shall most readily attain the mean, i.e., the good." Aristotle, Ethics: Book II, 9
Mr. Peters you mention you're 'fallen'. I assume you've not fallen from anything literally, so you're being metaphoric.
Mr. Peters,
As the snow blows every which way outside the cafe window and my parked car slowly disappears under a drift, my mind drifts deeper into this dichotomy of reason and faith, and dwells on the term "fallen". Is it true that the doctrine of the fall of man itself is based on a false opposition of human reason and divine revelation – or as you put it, "a paradox of agency versus Providence[?]" So writes one Friedrich Hansen over at The Brussels Journal.
According to Herr Hansen, "For in contrast to the Hebrew original story, the Hellenized Christian version with its deterministic legacy denies Adam the freedom of unmediated redemption by way of remorse. More precisely the mainstream Christian and even more so the Calvinist inescapable “Original sin” follows the logic of a patronizing church that makes a huge difference between Post-Temple Judaism and episcopal Christianity: the Jew can correct and therefore redeem himself before God, the Hellenized Christian can’t, rather depending on Jesus and his apostles to redeem him."
I think the mediated way of remorse, guided by centuries of wisdom and undergirded by firm dogma, does a rather better job of "correcting" the errant sinner than all that freedom; but then it seems the Jews are not all that interested in anything that might curtail their agency.
I took a brief look at Hansen's blog post which is really a review of a book by an Israeli. It is a pretty fast-and-loose piece of history based on a number of premises, e.g., the importance of Philo, the philosophical depth of Jewish pre-Christian thought, the influence of Maimonides on Thomas, etc etc, none of which I am prepared to accept without a great deal of study an analysis. Hansen is himself a physician who takes an interest in Islamic thought. On balance, I would say he has not done his homework well enough to make any of the sweeping pronouncements he puts on display. His piece is at best a piece of amateurish eccentricity and if taken serious perhaps pernicious.
Of course there could not be a gap between faith and reason unless there were first a dogmatic faith, which means Christianity. Accepting that, one can see that everything he and his Israeli scholar have to say is tautological.
the Hellenized Christian version with its deterministic legacy
the Calvinist inescapable “Original sin”
On an ordinary day, these two quips alone might have deterred me from reading whatever source they came from, though I must admit they are an interesting insight into how at least one Jew views Christian theology and in correcting the errors we come to see just how completely the New Testament is a fulfillment of the Old.
Dr. Fleming,
Great to have you back on the site.
And yes, it is as simple as that: accept Christianity and you have accepted that there will be a gap between faith and reason. I had already begun to be suspicious of his conclusions and motives, but Hansen's rhetoric – his "false opposition" – momentarily nonplussed me. Instead of recognizing the forest, I tried to fell the trees in my path: why "false"? And how "opposition"? When in truth, there need not be any opposition – God gave us both the power of reason and the capacity for faith, and then blessed us with the Incarnation to help us bridge the gap and pick the fruits of both.