Laborem Solis sive Eclipsis Moralis: Sine Traditio

THE SQUELCHING OF THE NATURAL LAW affects not only individuals, but it shows itself in social ways, some of which Budziszewski identifies in his book What We Can't Not Know. Modernly, there has been a philosophical rejection of any objective morality, to the point that it has become habitual, impulsive, almost a second nature. Social mores are passed down through traditions, and traditions have an important role in unifying a people, in educating them into systems supportive of the moral life, and in preparing them for critical thinking with respect to moral problems. They can work for both good and ill depending upon whether the tradition supports, or detracts from, the natural law.

The contemporaneous West has rejected any normative, objective moral order, and traditions supportive of that natural moral order have been intentionally squelched, to the point where any traditional support has been erased, or at least atrophied. We have developed a sort of tradition of traditionlessness. Following in the wake of this the tradition of traditionlessness is a deracination, a rootlessness, in modern man.

The "Traditio Legis"
Christ Handing Down the Law to His Apostles

This rootlessness arises from, and contributes to, a variety of cultural and social factors. It is sort of like a dog chasing its own tail. A large part of society's rootlessness can be placed upon an intentional suppression of traditions, principally motivated by liberal (and false) notions of freedom of thought or (what may be the same thing) an animus against Western, specifically Christian, values in our academia and intelligentsia. In his second letter to the Thessalonians, St. Paul admonishes the Christian flock to "stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle." (2 Thess. 2:15) Our modern academics and thinkers by and large spurn such Pauline advice.

Our society has not stood fast. That is not always the fault of the common people. Too often, this traditionlessness has been imposed from the top down, by an educational or health care system adjusting to dictats from the U.S. Supreme Court or ukases from federal and state bureaucrats. Some of it unquestionably arises from competitors to the traditional source of culture--the family--for example, television and popular music, media which are governed more by profit and by marketing than by cultural value. So the anti-virgin ("like a virgin") Madonna replaced the real virgin: La Madonna (O Virgo virginum!). Some of it may also be attributable to fast-paced modern ways of life which are corrosive of traditional cultures.

Budziszewski defines tradition as a "shared way of life which molds the mind, character, and imagination of those who practice it, for better or for worse." Tradition is "a sort of apprenticeship in living, with all of the previous generations as masters, and includes not only ways of doing things, but ways of raising questions about things that matter." In the name of multiculturalism, in the name of political correctness, in an oversensitivity to minority cultures, in the desire to rid the society of its vestiges of Judaeo-Christian traditions, or the desire to rid oneself of the "shackles," the supposed mortmain, of "Dead White European Males," our leaders and our educators have opted for a traditionlessness, which is really nothing other than replacing one tradition with another. Traditionlessness is "not the absence of tradition so much as a particular, unsound sort of tradition which does not recognize itself as tradition, disbelieves whatever it does recognize as a tradition, and is traditionally smug about its disbelief." Budziszewski (2003), 162. Traditionlessness occurs when when we prohibit the handing down of things by prohibitions, and so the creche or the Ten Commandments are banished from public spaces, from courthouses and from Wal-Marts. Culture abhors a vacuum, so we replace signs with simulacra, and so the rich depthness of Christmas is replaced with artificial superficiality of Kwanzaa. Merry Christmas becomes banal Happy Holidays. Traditionlessness occurs when the organic fabric of a culture is replaced with a quiltwork, a pastiche of different cultures, which ultimately is the demise of any culture.

Traditionlessness munches its own stump
or turns to nothing all it squats upon.
Tradition turning out tradition into
the immiserated world unspell us quite.*

Simon Jarvis identifies the social effects of traditionlessness. It lives off of its moral and intellectual capital, munching its own stump, sort of like Saturn devouring his children. Its result is not growth, but defecation of nothingness. It immiserates, make us poor, and has led to a way of living which is unspelled, which is to say disenchanted, the product of the Entzauberung of a secular frame of reference as Max Weber labelled it.

The loss is great, particularly in the West where, by and large, the tradition was based upon the truths of Christianity and the Gospel: Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. By dismantling our heritage, by banning it from the formation of our youth, we have dumbed ourselves through a sort of intellectual self-flagellation:

In general, a person who has been raised in a sound tradition is far better prepared to change his mind, should his beliefs prove faulty in some particular respect, than a person who has been raised "to make up his own mind" about them. While the former has at least acquired some equipment--the habit of taking important things seriously, and a body of inherited reflections about what some of these things are--the latter is weighed down with different baggage: the habit of not taking important things seriously, and the habit of considering the way things really are as less important than what he thinks of them at the moment.

Budziszewski (2003), 163.

The loss of a sound tradition is a great loss because it is more difficult to build than to tear down. It is easier to suppress the Latin mass than to re-institute it after a generation or two of Mass in the vulgar tongue. It is easier to destroy families by loosening the chains that bind a man and wife than it is to try to re-habitualize people to the notion that marriage is a permanent union. Downhill is always easier. The descent to hell is easy. It is climbing uphill that is laborious. As we have noted in prior postings:

Facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

(Virgil, Aeneid, VI.124 ff.)

How to retrieve the tradition? This is a difficult question to answer. An impediment to an invigoration of sound tradition is our way of life. The disruption of the family, the first school of our children, is a significant inhibitor to proper inculturation.

The vigor of sound traditions requires a way of life in which generations live in close proximity and have discourse with each other. It requires that people in general live in communities in which they know each other and can hold each other accountable. It requires that in relations among the various cultural institutions--parents, schools, government and so forth--the agents higher on the totem pole regard themselves merely as servants of the lower, and not as their masters or competitors.

Budziszewski(2003), 163. Generations have dismantled. It will take generations to remantle.

______________________________
*Simon Jarvis, The Unconditional: A Lyric (London: Barque, 2005), 32-33.

"Law Like Love"--2nd Myth--Traditions of the Elders

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;

These “impotent grandfathers” are reactionaries who base the law on the customs of the ancients, who want to undo the present and return to times past. In Auden’s view, this represents an abandonment of reason and prudence, and relies on an ideology, a dogma that insists that everything old or done in times past is ipso facto good.

Auden calls this unthinking, reflexive conservatism “impotent.” Law based upon pure senectitude, the flaccid holding of times past, and not on Reason. This is not the wisdom of the ancients applied and adopted to new circumstances. This is not a vision of Law based upon a virile or perenially-true philosophy, but a vision of Law that borders on the doddering babblings of a feeble senility, a view of Law that suffers from sclerosis. That, at least, is how Auden refers to its advocates.

One cannot help but think that Auden, in these short two verses, refers to the criticism of the Benthamite Sydney Smith (1771-1845),[i] as found in his Fallacies of Anti-Reformers, and adopts them as his own:

Our Wise Ancestors—The Wisdom of Our Ancestors—The Wisdom of Ages Venerable Antiquity—Wisdom of Old Times.—This mischievous and absurd fallacy springs from the grossest perversion of the meaning of words. Experience is certainly the mother of wisdom, and the old have, of course, a greater experience than the young; but the question is who are the old? and who are the young? Of individuals living at the same period, the oldest has, of course, the greatest experience; but among generations of men the reverse of this is true. Those who come first (our ancestors) are the young people, and have the least experience. We have added to their experience the experience of many centuries; and, therefore, as far as experience goes, are wiser, and more capable of forming an opinion than they were. The real feeling should be, not can we be so presumptuous as to put our opinions in opposition to those of our ancestors? but can such young, ignorant, inexperienced persons as our ancestors necessarily were, be expected to have understood a subject as well as those who have seen so much more, lived so much longer, and enjoyed the experience of so many centuries? All this cant, then, about our ancestors is merely an abuse of words, by transferring phrases true of contemporary men to succeeding ages. Whereas (as we have before observed) of living men the oldest has, caeteris paribus, the most experience; of generations, the oldest has caeteris paribus, the least experience. Our ancestors, up to the Conquest, were children in arms; chubby boys in the time of Edward I; striplings under Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white-bearded, silver-headed ancients, who have treasured up, and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can supply. We are not disputing with our ancestors the palm of talent, in which they may or may not be our superiors, but the palm of experience in which it is utterly impossible they can be our superiors. And yet, whenever the Chancellor comes forward to protect some abuse, or to oppose some plan which has the increase of human happiness for its object, his first appeal is always to the wisdom of our ancestors; and he himself, and many noble lords who vote with him, are, to this hour, persuaded that all alterations and amendments on their devices are an unblushing controversy between youthful temerity and mature experience!—and so, in truth they are—only that much—loved magistrate mistakes the young for the old, and the old for the young—and is guilty of that very sin against experience which he attributes to the lovers of innovation.

****

What was the wisdom of the single age which enacted the law, compared with the wisdom of the age which proposes to alter it? What are the eminent men of one and the other period? If you say that our ancestors were wiser than us, mention your date and year. If the splendor of names is equal, are the circumstances the same? If the circumstances are the same, we have a superiority of experience, of which the difference between the two periods is the measure. It is necessary to insist upon this; for upon sacks of wool, and on benches forensic, sit grave men, and agricolous persons in the Commons, crying out: “Ancestors, ancestors! hodie non! Saxons, Danes, save us! Fiddlefrig, help us! Howel, Ethelwolf, protect us!” Any cover for nonsense—any veil for trash—any pretext for repelling the innovations of conscience and of duty![ii]

Yet Auden’s criticism of the knee-jerk conservative view of law as tradition does not put him in the camp of the progressives or liberals or Benthamites who seem to advocate of change for change’s sake, and give no weight to inherited customs which often define a people. This is clear from the two immediately following verses to which we next turn.

[i] Sydney Smith, an English clergyman, eventually became prebendary of Bristol and Canon of St. Paul’s. He was considered to be one of the cleverest men of his age. In one of his many works, Smith reviewed Jeremy Bentham’s Book of Fallacies: From the Unfinished Papers of Jeremy Bentham. Notably, Auden was editor of, and wrote an introduction to, a book of selected writings of Sydney Smith, and so would have been intimately familiar with him. See W. H. Auden, ed. Selected Writings of Sydney Smith (London: Farrar, Staus & Cudahy, 1956).
[ii]http://smith.classicauthors.net/FallaciesOfAntiReformers/FallaciesOfAntiReformers1.html.

Ecstasis and Telos: Renè Descartes and His Dreams

"COGITO ERGO SUM," the Cartesian Coordinate System (x, y, z), methodological doubt, and the pineal gland as seat of the soul (if Homer nods, Descartes lapsed into a full coma with that one) are some of the first things that come into mind when Renè Descartes (1596-1650) is mentioned. Commonly regarded the "Father of Modern Philosophy," Descartes ushered in what has been called the "epistemological turn" (Wolff) or "epistemological crisis" (MacIntyre), making him the watershed so to speak, between modern philosophy with its focus on epistemology (how or even if we know) from the philosophy before that time which focused on ontology or metaphysics (what we know). Some philosophical wag (Whitehead) said that the history of philosophy is a footnote to Plato. We may fairly say that the history of modern philosophy is a footnote to Descartes. The proto-skeptic (or perhaps more accurately the proto-neo-skeptic) Descartes looms large in any history of philosophy.

This is obviously not the forum to discuss Descartes in any depth, nor do I have the competency to tackle that subject, but we ought to identify and summarize those parts of Descartes's philosophical system (loosely called Cartesianism) that contradict the classical or traditional (read Christian) theory of Natural Law. The most important of these relate to Descartes's notion of Nature and of Man. Specifically, his rejection of any teleology in Nature, which constituted a rejection of the notion of an Eternal Law. We may also point to his theory of body and soul (what has been called "angelism" or "mind in the machine").

Although there are exceptions and qualifications (there almost always are), generally speaking, before Descartes, man's nature or substance was generally perceived hylomorphically, that is, as a blended duality, both matter and form, body and soul. (Hylomorphism is a word formed from two Greek words, ύλη (hylo), meaning "wood," and by extension, "matter," and μορφή (morphē) meaning "form" or "shape"). That notion is particularly prevalent in Aristotle's philosophy. In his philosophical musings, Descartes vehemently rejected such a conception. Descartes viewed man's nature as a duality of natures that lived in an uneasy joinder. The soul was seen as a sort of angelic pilot, a spiritual humuncular, a mini-spirit, which piloted the ship of the body. For Descartes, the great unprejudiced one, this navigation was done through the pineal gland. Jacques Maritain called this Cartesian teaching "Angelism": "Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances, joined to another no one knows how: on the one hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought—an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland." (Maritain, The Dream of Descartes, 179).

Like the poet Mallarme's aged dying patient in the hospital who was unwilling to accept the human condition, Descartes may be said to have exclaimed:

Je me mire et me vois ange!
I admire myself, and see myself angelic!

(Stéphane Mallarmé, Les fenêtres, "The Windows")

Matthew Levering views Descartes's thoughts on the relationship between body and soul as being of great significance (Levering, pp. 86 ff.) Among other places, Descartes's efforts in trying to derive a new philosophy is reflected in his Meditations. In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes addresses the relationship between body and soul.

It is manifest that Descartes distinguishes his "I" from his body, viewing his body as something wholly separate, though very closely engaged to or "mingled" with his "I." Levering, 90. Though his senses play well-enough the role of informing the body reliably of its needs, the senses are unreliable in the area of truth. Descartes views the body as a complex organic machine, "so built and composed of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin," and responsive to laws that are independent of the mind. He repeated his fascination with the body as a "machine" both his Discourse on Method as well as his in his Treatise of Man, where he stated: “I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.” The "I" is uncoupled and independent of the body. For Descartes, "it is not necessary to the 'I' that it have bodiliness, since even were bodiliness proven to be an illusion, the 'I' would be real." Levering, 89. It is this "I" alone, and not the "I with the body," which thinks. It is this "I" alone, and not this "I with the body," which certainly exists. Descartes is as far as can be from John Paul II's "theology of the body."

Descartes arrived at his views through intensive introspection in a series of meditations and the application of a methodology of radical doubt. Although Descartes's "looking within" for answers is not particularly novel or objectionable, what was new and what has turned out to be significant was his notion, as Charles Taylor in his Source of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) puts it, that the moral sources are within us exclusively, and bear no relationship to any external reference, such as our body or the cosmos at large. Descartes brought about "a transposition by which we no longer see ourselves as related to moral sources outside of us, or at least not at all in the same way." (Taylor, Sources of the Self, 143.)

Descartes abandoned the notion of an Eternal Law, at least to the degree that it manifested itself in God's created world, the cosmos, including the body and mind of man. As Charles Taylor succinctly puts it: "Descartes utterly rejected [the] teleological mode of thinking and abandoned any theory of ontic logos." Sources of the Self, 144. And Levering concludes: For Descartes "Neither the 'I' nor the machine-body are identified by teleological ends." Levering, 90.

Descartes clearly had no patience for the philosophers and theologians before him. Convinced that he was fated to derive a true philosophy, Descartes jettisoned the past, and tried to start the philosophical journey afresh. There is thus another spirit in Descartes of which we should be aware. His distrust of received teaching, of tradition, of inherited culture was notable. He may have considered himself enlightened and unburdened by what he viewed as unreasonable prejudices of the past. But what blinded him was that he himself suffered from a prejudice perhaps more vicious. Descartes suffered from what Hans-George Gadamer would call "das Vorurteil gegen die Vorurteile," the prejudice against prejudices, which, of course, is a prejudice in itself. This impatience with the past simply because it is the past is something that the Enlightenment seems to have foisted upon us, and it carries particular weight in our country. Too often, this dissatisfaction with the past leads to a state of unrootedness, restlessness, a thirst for novelty, and frequently banality. The theory with the best press is the "newest" theory, the theory that claims to debunk an "old" theory, the titilating theory, and not necessarily the best theory.

Though there is obviously room for critical thought, and blind enslavement to the past simply because it is the past is never to be fostered, there has to be room for a prudent and intelligent reserve against change in favor of the inherited traditions of our culture. The critical intellect has to recognize the validity of St. Paul's injunction to "stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us." (2 Thess. 2:15) Else we run the risk of flailing in the winds of novelty.

There are few who can build a philosophy of life from scratch within their lifetimes. And Descartes's effort was audacious. Even if we have the talent, the honesty, and the grace, we will not have the time to think all things anew. With respect to the American penchant for rejecting the past, and embracing some progressive future, de Tocqueville observed: "Of all the countries in the world, America is the one in which the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed." (Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America (Geroge Lawrence, trans.) (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 429.) This spirit is markedly different from that embraced by G. K. Chesterton, who, in his Orthodoxy, noted that "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

Foundations once destroyed, what can the just man do? (Cf. Ps. 11 [10]:3). Though it was easy enough to pursue his methodological doubt, and reject a teleology in nature and the unity of body and soul, Descartes seems to have been at a loss in deriving a substitute basis for morality. While he nursed his doubts in his Discourse, Descartes advanced a "provisional morality" (une morale par provision) composed of four maxims. Though this provisional morality is one of outward conformity and practical conservatism, it is cowardly prudent, and not particularly edifying. It is hardly persuasive as a recipe for the good life that God calls us to live. In a way, Descartes is a type of the modern ethics which, in light of its inability to know the universal good, also calls for a highly dissatisfying "provisional morality," one largely based upon secular presumptions, and process not substance.

About 2,000 years ago, between Christ and Barabbas, we chose Barabbas. About 400 years ago, between Christ and Descartes, we chose Descartes. Perhaps its time for a reassessement? Perhaps its time for a turn?