The Fallacy of Guilt by Association

Facism and bad geneaology.

A thread prompted by @doctorow on the crossovers between organic-pastoral ideologies & fascism https://t.co/dBZ4PDoSV7 acknowledging @Leigh_Phillips

— Chris Smaje (@csmaje) February 5, 2021

Compromise and the American Founding by Alin Fumurescu

As the “chords of affection” wore down, of course, compromise became less and less tenable, both in the North and South, and the debate over the American people was settled with the sword. https://t.co/srs32df5Fc

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) July 22, 2020

Cambridge University Press

Jordan Peterson on Postmodernism

Brad Gregory's Book The Unintended Reformation

Burned-Over District Observer: Imagining an Alternative History Without the Protestant Reformation

I still think the Protestants got played by secular princes for their own agendas...

And the Scotists are probably right to criticize that intellectual history which blames Scotus and univocity for everything...

First Things Still TheoCon

Is Liberalism a Heresy? by Francesca Aran Murphy
Why liberalism and a market economy are based on Christianity (via MoJ)

In general, theologians and philosophers should avoid genealogy. And women are more in love with hearing themselves talk (or write) than a rigorous argument. They can write on their own dime, not subsidized by an academic institution that isn't worthy of the name. If there is a value to ordered liberty it is not as it is elaborated by modern liberals but by those who uphold some form of a more traditional Anglo-American political tradition.

Jack Donovan, Donald Trump Isn’t Your Daddy, And He Can’t Fix What’s Broken In America

The only culture Americans truly share is a culture of commerce. They identify with each other across racial, ethnic and sexual boundaries through a common love of products, of musical performers, of movies and television shows and clothing brands and sports teams. This culture of commerce is only capable of inspiring a national unity as cheap and disposable as the products that characterize it. If you could get everyone to be as fanatically devoted to the country as Apple users are to Apple, you might have something approaching a national culture, but the nation is divided over Apple and PC in rather the same way it is divided between Republicans and Democrats or gun users and gun prohibitionists.

Christian Humanism

Humanism and Religion: Renewing Western Culture by Robert Woods

A review of Jens Zimmerman's Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture

The author's faculty page.
The Humanist Lens

Fr. Louis Bouyer wrote a book on the Christian humanism of the Renaissance, and iirc, he contended that Christian humanism was the dominant feature of the Renaissance, as Christians sought to revivive "classical learning," not the rejection of Christianity in favor of some new rationalism (or paganism), as some secularists like to claim. I think Dr. Fleming fairly recently criticized certain figures of the Renaissance for developing an ideology of individualism, but I don't recall him condemning the Renaissance as a whole. Were the Christian humanists of the Renaissance period a bit naive in their approach to the past? Did they fail to sufficiently appreciate the "Middle Ages" and their intellectual predecessors?

Thaddeus Kozinski on Saving Modernity

A new Christendom: Can Christianity breathe life into modernity?

"The transition from enlightenment, secular foundationalism to post-enlightenment, secular traditionalism can best be understood by considering the transition from the early-medieval synthesis of faith and reason to its divorce in late-medieval nominalism and voluntarism. Such a consideration can also help us to predict and depict more accurately what the next transition might look like."

I won't say this genealogy has "long been discredited" by intellectual historians; indeed it remains popular among Catholics. Who is able to write a scholarly historically accurate refutation of the thesis?

The Enlightenment was a tool for those pursuing the "will to power" - some may have been sincere believers in liberalism, but was it true of all who sought to increase their own power? I do think that it remains useful to look at various historical trends as a rejection of various forms of authority and tradition, but I would not tie every individual rejection with the concomitant adoption of Enlightenment ideology.

"In the words of Maritain, there has been a certain maturation of the political order, and it does look like the Gospel seed has come to a greater fruition in certain temporal areas - though there is room for much more growth, and there have been many misshapen and misbegotten stalks, as well as abortive fruits. One simply cannot discount or reject the modernity-friendly Gaudium et Spes in this regard. This maturation, and the real responsibility that it demands, which is the aspect of modernity gravely lacking today, is the true message of Gaudium et Spes when interpreted correctly according to the hermeneutic of continuity - that is, not as a replacement of the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, but as its complement. After Vatican II, no Catholic can interpret the prior Leonine social teaching and theology as simply a rejection of modernity, but neither can he reject or dismiss the prior teaching as outdated or simply mistaken."

How many of the advances in "science" and technology were possible because of the excess wealth first made possible through empire, supplemented later by cheap energy? As for the supposed maturation of the political order - I deny such a thing has happened. To take one aspect, we have drifted away any authentic form of republican government. Is it not the case that those who have maintained the consolidation of political and economic power during the early stages of nationalism have done so while proclaiming themselves to be fervent believers in "democracy" and "freedom"? The current political [dis-]order cannot be "Christianized" because it itself is opposed to right reason. Evangelization can only prepare people for death or possibly for a new, more localist order arising from the old.

Perhaps there are no "convincing and satisfying answers" because there are no easy answers that enable the current system to be perpetuated. Any real movement towards republicanism cannot but be a subversion of the system.

Robert Koons on Uhmerican Higher Ed

Dark Satanic Mills of Mis-Education: Some Proposals for Reform by Robert C. Koons

Talk of a higher education “bubble” is well justified. The reasonably priced state university degree of even modest quality is no longer available. The reason for the upward cost spiral is easy to find: an arms race for prestige, which is inherently a zero-sum game, driving up the salaries of both administrators and well-published research professors. The rising costs have almost no relation to the quality of instruction.

As a result of the moral degeneration of the university, the Baconian promise of economic prosperity through research and education is increasingly an empty one. Fewer and fewer American students have the self-discipline required even for degrees like engineering, natural science, or accounting, which offer short-term economic benefit. Most so-called research is next to worthless, since its value is defined in self-referential terms: good research in each field is whatever good researchers in that field do (as defined by leading journals and conferences), regardless of any benefit or lack of benefit to the wider community. This self-referential circle means that research in even the hard sciences becomes increasingly political and unrelated to reality.

For individual students, the economic return on an American college degree is in free fall. Fewer than 30 percent of graduates secure a job that “requires” a college degree (in any sense). Median salary of college graduates last year: $27,000 a year. Average debt burden: $21,000. As a result, we have begun to see the emergence of the Uncollege movement (www. uncollege.org), with a growing number of young people joining the ranks of the higher education refuseniks, following in the footsteps of entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Michael Zuckerburg.

Check out also his recommendations. Catholic colleges and universities should get on the bandwagon for reform, if they can overcome their institutional inertia (based in part on the assumption of perpetual growth) and the acceptance of the nationalist myth.

Pierre Manent on Modernity

But does he satisfactorily explain what separates "Modern" from pre-Modern? He does give a (Straussian?) explanation of the Modern project with Machiavelli as one of the central actors, but I'm not buying it.

Pierre Manent, City, Empire, Church, Nation
How the West created modernity
(via FT)

There is something terrible in human action: what makes us human is also what exposes us, takes us out of ourselves, and sometimes causes us to lose ourselves. In the beginning, human beings gathered, fished, hunted, or even made war, which is a kind of hunting; but they acted as little as possible, leaving much to the gods and tying themselves down with prohibitions, rites, and sacred restraints. Historically, properly human action first appears as crime or transgression. This, according to Hegel, is what Greek tragedy brings to light: innocently criminal action. Tragedy recounts the passage from what precedes action to properly human action.

Say what? Is that a true presentation of what "primitive" cultures believed about human action? Sounds like someone's setting up human action to be some sort of liberation from superstition disguised as divinely-imposed restraint. I hear a serpent calling.

Manent explains that the Modernity is a political project of collective action, in which "democracy" holds a central place. The roots of the project can be found in ancient Greece. The city was insufficient by itself to secure internal and external peace and so what was needed was empire. And then the Church appears.

Not only did the imperial idea mark the West through the enduring prestige of the Roman Empire; the idea was reborn in a new form, one that was, again, particular to Europe. This was the Catholic or universal Church, which aimed to reunite all mankind in a new communion, closer than that of the most enclosed city and more extensive than that of the vastest empire. Of all the political forms of the West, the Church extended the greatest promises, since it proposed this community, at once city and empire; but it was also the most disappointing, since it failed to bring about the universal association for which it had awakened a desire.

Though I have just surveyed the history of premodern Europe with the speed and delicacy of Attila the Hun, I have gathered the elements of the situation that will allow me to elaborate the modern project.

Europeans were divided among the city, the empire, and the Church. They lived under these mixed and competing authorities, these three modes of human association. The cities that survived or were reborn were in competition with—indeed, often at war with—the Roman Empire (now known as the Holy Roman Empire, in what is today Germany); and the Church was in competition with the cities and the empire, which, in turn, were in competition with it. The disorder was dreadful, a conflict of authorities and of loyalty. It was this confusion that the modern project wanted to allow us to escape—and in this, it succeeded.

As a result, not only were there competing authorities but competing identities as well:

The conflicts had to do with institutions but also, more profoundly, with the human type that would inspire European life. Whom to imitate? Did one have to follow the life of humble sacrifice for which Christ provided the model? Or was it better to lead the proud, active life of the warrior-citizen, a life for which Rome had provided the framework and of which Rome was the product par excellence? Should Europeans, surveying the ancient world, admire Cato or Caesar? Europeans no longer knew which city they wanted, or were able, to inhabit; thus they did not know what kind of human being they wanted, or were able, to be. It was in this radical perplexity, and in order to come to terms with it, that the modern project was born.

Competing authorities and authoritative texts lead to a disconnect between speech and action. Which texts were to determine action? The Reformation was one answer to this question. Machievelli gave another, directed especially at the tension between Christianity and the way men actually were.

Now, the greatest distance between speech and action is introduced by the Christian Word, which requires men to love what they naturally hate (their enemies) and to hate what they naturally love (themselves). The modern political project, which Machiavelli was the first to formulate, was therefore a response—it began as a response, in any case—to the “Christian situation,” one marked by competition among authorities, disorder of references, anarchy of words, and, above all, the demoralizing contrast between what men said and what they did.

Isn't that a erroneous account of Christian charity? (Or, more accurately, of the emotion of hate, which is not opposed to charity or rational love?) But this false account may be needed by Manent to make his point.

The problem of the Christian age was solved, therefore, by the sovereign state and by representative government—that is, by our political regime considered as a whole. My object here is not to describe the mechanisms or, for that matter, to sketch the history of the representative regime. Still, one point must be emphasized. The decisive factor in the reconciliation between speech and action is the formation of a common speech by the elaboration, perfection, and diffusion of a national language. Luther’s Reformation was a spiritual upheaval, but it was also inseparably a political revolution and a national insurrection. Too often forgotten is that even before the modern state was consolidated and became capable of authorizing or prohibiting effectively, the nation had emerged in Europe as the setting for the appropriation of the Christian Word, which the universal Church had proved incapable of teaching effectively. Each European nation chose the Christian confession under which it wished to live and essentially imposed it, after many attempts, on its “sovereign.” Europe assumed its classic form with the “confessional nation,” soon to be crowned by its absolute sovereign, who would later bring about its “secularization”; and this was the form in which it succeeded in organizing itself in the most stable and durable manner. From then on, it was in the framework of a national civic conversation that Europeans sought to link their speech with their actions and their actions with their speech. The national form preceded and conditioned representative government.

Having rejected the authority of the Church and weakened it, the elites controlled the modern nation-state. Can we really say that we have had "representative" government in the West, rather than rule by a few, regardless of the general population's approval of them through the fiction of voting? Manent may just be giving his analysis, rather than approving the modern nation-state as a solution, but he is missing something in his account of the rise of the modern nation-state, and how its development necessarily violates the human scale. Without this, he can pretend that the modern nation-states are democratic, but they really aren't. They are governed for the benefit of the few.

The divorce between action and speech helps explain the new role of political correctness. Because speech is no longer tied to a possible and plausible action against which we might measure it, many take speech as seriously as if it were itself an action and consider speech they do not like equivalent to the worst possible action. Offending forms of speech are tracked down and labeled, in the language of pathologists, “phobias.” The progress of freedom in the West once consisted of measuring speech by the standard of visible actions; political correctness consists of measuring speech by the standard of invisible intentions.

Bad psychology as philosophy? A simplistic thesis to explain the evolution of Western polities; the need to match words to action. (Straussian emphasis on texts or their understanding of logos/logoi?) The changes were not due to the need for man to resolve tensions within himself in his beliefs, but rather it is the story of the struggle of power after the fall of Adam and Eve, with some unique Western features.

James Matthew Wilson Offers a Description of Modernity

James Matthew Wilson, Against Rationalism, Idealism, and Abstraction
Part II in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church. Read Part I here.

The traditionalist wishes to defend the reverence and deference due to inherited folk ways in spite of their appearances of irrationality, and often does so by taking a stand in defense of the irrational per se. Such is political romanticism. And the traditionalist presumes, understandably, that securing allegiance to a tradition will in turn keep in place the essential elements of a localized and intergenerational community. If one toes the line of spiritual tradition, the body of natural community will be sustained. If one demands fidelity and solidarity to one’s own as the highest if inexplicable good, one can secure the perseverance of an entire way of life. Modernity is consequently decried as rationalist, idealist, and abstracting—claims I take to be true, but perhaps not for the reasons the traditionalist critique would recognize.

Surely, modernity is beholden to this triad of fetishes. I would argue that insofar as modernity is “rationalistic,” it has ceased to believe in reason; insofar as it is idealist, it neglects not simply the body but the idea of reality; and insofar as it tends toward abstraction, it has failed rather than succeeded in being adequately critical of the concrete conditions of human knowledge.

I hope he elaborates more on what he takes to be the weakness of the traditionalist position is (as stated in the first paragraph).