Back to School
I've just started reading the latest book by one of my teachers, Thomas Pangle: Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham.
Reading this great argument takes me back to grad school. I'm especially struck about the introductory argument in favour of truly returning to Scripture--learning what we can from it, taking it utterly seriously, trying to understand how serious people could believe it to be literally true. The great problem for Pangle, as for his teacher before him, Allan Bloom, is that despite our talk about being open to diversity and controversy, intellectuals today typically have a complacent faith that they need not take seriously many books and ideas from the past. The more ideological will have a doctrine to explain their rejection of old views--the patriarchy, cultural imperialism, or whatever--but the truth is they don't think they need an explanation. They are riding the train they want to be on, and they are confident it is going where they want to go.
UPDATE:
Pangle explains the need to get past the treatment of Scripture in the early moderns:
"...they consciously prepare a world mesmerized by the rewards of secular progress, in which fewer and fewer, even or especially among the thoughtful, will recognize that it is worthwhile to make the effort to confront in a sustained way the challenge posed to reason, and its secular progress, by Scripture. The ultimate cultural aim of the modern theologico-political treatises is to reduce religious reflection and argument (along with...virtue...) to the status of a birdlike cacophony of merely private and personal, shallow and shifting, opinions.
"...the discussion not only of theology but of humanity's spiritual fulfillment and destiny has become radically 'relativized' and thus increasingly rendered unserious....there is practically no access to genuine encounter with the texts that make possible a passionate and intense quest for final answers to the fundamental and abiding questions of the eternal truth about divinity and human excellence. [Without reversing the achievements of liberalism, on the level of thought and self-understanding] we must break out of this cultural amusement park that more or less benevolently confines us like etiolated adolescents."
The people being attacked here would probably be proud to be known as "liberals," but is this really a conservative argument, in the sense that it proceeds from conservative dogma or doctrine? Pangle seems confident that there are fundamental questions, and that the pursuit of them is always worthwhile. We need to appreciate, and carefully study, "old books," simply because they are tools in this endeavour. He doesn't say he has any final answers, nor that he is confident that any of them are "conservative" answers.
I believe he is really trying to follow the Socratic approach. Once one is convinced that there are no answers, or that they are not to be found from discredited (out of date, "right wing") sources, one can dismiss the Bible, Plato, or whatever. But then what raw material does actually have to exercise one's mind, challenge one's assumptions, and approach a truly new understanding? Socrates would apparently consider the views of a wide range of people, and take these views (perhaps) even more seriously than their proponents did. Without necessarily agreeing with any propositions, he would keep turning them over. What do they mean? How do apparently related propositions truly bear on each other? Are they consistent, coherent, helpful?
There is a tendency to believe rationalism is basically opposed to revelation or faith. Once again, if one believes that dogmatically, one will cease to take Scripture or particular statements of faith seriously. In his very opening pages Pangle speaks of how Socrates would say his entire philosophic activity had a divine, erotic source. "...but if love is to conduct the soul to the truly divine, to the truth about the divine, then love must be purified in the fire of severely self-critical rational investigation of both love itself and its primary or apparent objects."
Bright young people today more or less take for granted that they are more open and diverse and global and multicultural and wise than anyone has ever been. In fact, they have achieved the wisdom of Socrates (without much effort), or even more. This is a truly stunning combination of a somewhat sophisticated, jargon-laden complacency about wisdom, combined with a rationale for not following Socrates' example and pursuing true, troubling and disturbing, difficult-to-attain wisdom at all.
I will be dealing with this in different ways in American Con Law. The Casey decision on abortion contains a famous passage that pro-lifers love to ridicule. (Co-authors are O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter) "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State." Not only is autonomous, radically isolated decision-making the path to wisdom or depth, it is somehow itself the same as the greatest possible wisdom. To paraphrase a bit unfairly: any choice that you seem to have made totally on your own, no matter how thoughtless, gives you direct access to the mystery of human life.
The 2003 Lawrence case (Kennedy for the Court) quotes that passage from Casey, and adds references to liberty including "liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions." Kennedy I believe came to the Court as a Roman Catholic, married with several children, from Sacramento. The majority of the Rehnquist Court are more or less conservatives, depending on the issue. They are elderly, and sit in solemn ceremony in black robes. Yet they publish, with obvious pride and satisfaction, remarks that are reminiscent of hippies at a love-in in the 60s.
The point is not that this is the worst possible outcome, or that all the practical consequences are bad. It is simply that the thoughtlessness is amazing.
I'd like to develop an argument that the United States remains the most modern of societies--with a whole-hearted dedication to technology including biotechnology and in-vitro fertilization. All "conservative" social bonds are expected to give way to "progress," as the high rates of divorce and abortion indicate. Even when families stay in touch, they are amazingly mobile, moving to the distant corners of the country and even the world for education or jobs. Yet the U.S. also displays more "conservative" debates--about capital punishment, cloning, abortion and to some extent even the family--than almost any other liberal democracy. The debate is seldom allowed to slow down "progress." Sometimes there is a conservative decision, such as the restrictions on cloning research, or the pitched battles on so-called "partial birth abortion." Yet the U.S. surely stores more fertilized human embryos, for use in IVF, than any country, and pro-lifers and religious people, as far as I know, say very little about it.
Somehow the conservatives provide one kind of hope that at least there will be a debate. Of course, if they were truly in charge, they would not welcome Socrates any more than liberals do today. But as outsiders, they want minority views to be heard.
Minority? Sometimes it seems conservatives are winning the elections, while liberals are winning (only) in the courts; but that's not quite right either.
Now: does the debate about the Iraq war prove that Americans are prepared to defend Western civilization, while Europeans and Canadians rot in their nihilism? I kind of doubt it.
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