Edward Feser's Blog, page 24

Fr. Gregory Pine on prudence

Modern moral philosophers typically have much to say about abstract principles, but are not of much help for the average person seeking concrete moral advice.  Self-help books, meanwhile, have practical relevance but are philosophically superficial.  One of the strengths of Aquinas’s ethics is that it is philosophically sophisticated while at the same time offering practical guidance to non-philosophers.  This is especially true of his treatment of the virtues.  But even Aquinas sometimes needs a bit of exposition to make him accessible to modern readers.

For this reason, works like Fr. Gregory Pine’s new book Prudence: Choose Confidently, Live Boldly are most needed and welcome.  It is philosophically and theologically well-informed, while at the same time written with admirable clarity and relevance to real-world problems.  And its subject matter is of special importance, since prudence is that cardinal virtue most crucial to the successful pursuit of the moral life.

Fr. Gregory is interviewed about the book at Word on Fire, has given a brief overview of it on Pints with Aquinas and discussed it in greater depth on The Catholic Man Show.  Take a look!

Whose pantheism? Which dualism? A Reply to David Bentley Hart

Over at Substack, David Bentley Hart has written an open letter in reply to my recent review, at Public Discourse, of his book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature.  What follows is my own open letter in response.  Before reading it, it would help if you’ve already read my review and Hart’s reply.

Hello David,

Many thanks for your enjoyable and vigorous rejoinder.  If your eyes fall on this, I know they will be rolling at the prospect of yet another round.  But I cannot resist a reply to what seem to me basic misunderstandings, along with crucial concessions disguised as rebuttals.  I do promise to refrain from Photoshop antics and cheap puns, for the sake of preserving our armistice and basic good taste.  Plus, I wouldn’t want any of your readers to spill their sherry. 

As it happens, I have already addressed some of the points you make in a response to your namesake Seth Hart, who had also objected to my review of your book.  (No, he’s no relation to you, in case you are wondering.)  I don’t expect you to have read that, but I mention it since some people reading this will have done so, and I apologize to them for the overlap between what I say here and what I said there.  There’s new stuff here too, though, to make it worthwhile for them to read on.  (In case you are tempted to follow the link to my reply to Seth, I apologize to you too, since in that article I did indulge the temptation to pun.  It seems that on that score I am not able not to sin.)

The computer analogy

Let’s begin with my analogy of the laptop computer, which you characterize as a real howler.  Your substantive points (as opposed to derisive rhetoric) fail to justify that characterization.  In any analogy, there are only certain features of the analogues that are relevant to the point being made with the analogy.  For example, when Christ compares himself to a thief in the night, it would be silly to object to the analogy on the grounds that thievery is sinful and Christ is sinless.  For thievery is simply not relevant to the specific point being made with the analogy.

It is also crucial to follow out an analogy consistently.  There’s a scene in the Whit Stillman movie Barcelona where the character Ted compares the belligerents in a Third World civil war to warring ant colonies.  His listeners are outraged, one of them thinking that his point is that Third World populations are, from the American point of view, like mere ants.  Another objects that people in the Third World are people and not ants.  Ted tries, without success, to explain to them that they are missing the point – that it is an analogy, and that everyone, including Americans, is being reduced to ant scale in the analogy.  This illustrates how we need to be careful before jumping to conclusions about what the elements of an analogy are meant to correspond to in the real world.

I realize you know how analogies are supposed to work, but you seem momentarily to have forgotten it when evaluating the one I gave.  For you make errors in interpreting my computer analogy comparable to those I have just used as illustrations.  First, you complain that a computer is an artifact, whereas human beings are natural substances.  Now, as a card-carrying, dues-paying, unreconstructed Aristotelian metaphysician, I am, of course, as aware as anyone of the radical difference in kind between nature and artifice, which reflects the difference between substantial and accidental form.  But that is simply irrelevant to the specific point of the analogy, just as it is irrelevant to the specific point of Christ’s analogy that thievery is sinful.  There is a fact of the matter (even if it is a man-made fact of the matter) about what a computer is and what it was made for, and that’s enough for the purposes of the analogy.  True, artefactual kinds have fuzzier boundaries and functions than natural kinds, but that does not entail that they have no boundaries or functions at all.  And again, the rough-and-ready boundaries and functions that we unproblematically attribute to them every day are good enough for the purposes of the analogy.

You also complain that what actualizes the potential of a laptop computer to be supplemented with new applications, hardware, and the like, is a cause that is as much within the natural order as the computer itself is (rather than anything miraculous).  But here, like the listeners in Barcelona, you’re not paying careful enough attention to what corresponds to what in the analogy.  Yes, actual computers and their users and updaters are all in the natural order, just as human beings are human beings and not ants.  But again, it is an analogy, for goodness’ sake.  In the analogy, the computer itself is meant to correspond to human beings in a state of “pure nature.”  And supplementing it with new applications, hardware, etc. is meant to correspond to divine action to raise human beings to a supernatural end.  Yes, in real life, those who add an application or hardware to an existing computer are not performing a miracle or doing anything supernatural, but – to repeat myself – it’s an analogy.

Now, what is key to understanding the analogy is that there is a sense in which the laptop computer, without any such supplemental applications or hardware, is already complete as is.  It is not like, say, a computer without a battery or a functioning keyboard, which would obviously be incomplete.  Refraining from adding applications or hardware to the computer would not be like leaving out a battery.  The computer can do everything its designers and purchasers intended it to do even if the new applications and hardware are never added to it, whereas it could notdo so if it didn’t have a battery or functioning keyboard.  This is analogous to human beings in the state of “pure nature,” who would be complete with just natural knowledge of God and without the beatific vision.

The USB ports and downloading capacities of the computer correspond to the obediential potency for a supernatural end that human beings have even in a state of pure nature.  And it is crucial to understanding the analogy that the new applications and hardware that these make possible are sometimes unplanned and unforeseenby the designers of the computer.  So, the fact that designers do foresee somefuture applications and hardware does not undermine the analogy.  Neither does it “do your work for you” by effectively folding the supernatural into the natural.  In the analogy, it is, again, the unplanned and unforeseen future applications and hardware that correspond to the supernatural end, not the planned and foreseen ones.

Because said applications are unplanned and unforeseen – and thus do not exist within the computer even in an implicit or embryonic way – they can in no way arise from within the computer as it stands, but can be put into it only from without.  That corresponds to the way in which a supernatural end must be imposed on the state of pure nature entirely from without.  All the same, the USB ports, etc. – which are already built into the computer – make this external imposition on the computer possible.  (It would not be possible to put into, say, an old Commodore computer or Apple II Plus, hardware or software that is developed today for modern computers.)  And this corresponds to the fact that rational creatures have (as sub-rational creatures do not) a build-in obediential potency for the beatific vision, even though the beatific vision is in no way a natural end.

This is why the analogy illustrates more than just “non-repugnance,” contrary to what you say in your reply.  The USB ports, etc. positively point to there being some new applications and hardware or other that might be added.  That’s more than mere non-repugnance vis-à-vis such additions.  At the same time, they do not positively point to certain specific applications or hardware that might be added (namely, to those that were totally unknown and unforeseen by the designers of the computer).  This corresponds to the way that human beings in a state of pure nature point, by virtue of their rationality, to the possibility of some kind of supplemental end or other – but without pointing to the beatific vision specifically.

I am well aware, by the way, that you say much in your book about the distinction between the way the notion of an obediential potency was understood prior to Cajetan (which you illustrate with the example of Sara’s pregnancy) and how it was understood by Cajetan and his Thomist successors (where it is clearly meant to underwrite a truly supernatural end).  My analogy was intended to illustrate only what you characterize as the post-Cajetan conception, which is why it is a red herring to argue (as you do) that my analogy is not a good way to illustrate the other conception.  My review had gone way over the word limit as it was, and I had to leave things out.  Indeed, my review explicitly warned readers that “I have left out various nuances and details.”  But those details were not relevant to the specific points I was trying to make.

Anyway, here’s the thing.  When it is properly understood, the computer analogy is fine.  Read charitably (or, really, just fairly) it is not the ineptly prepared dog’s breakfast you make it out to be.  I understand that you are nevertheless going to reject the notion that I am using it to illustrate.  But to go on about the analogy being an “absolute catastrophe,” about its doing your work for you, about its not even getting Thomism right, etc. – well, there’s a lot of heat there to warm the hearts of the fans, but no light.

The bat analogy

You also miss the point of the analogy I borrow from Thomas Nagel, about wondering what it is like to be a bat.  You object that desiring such knowledge amounts to mere “curiosity,” whereas the desire for the beatific vision is obviously much more than that.  But while that is of course true, it is irrelevant to the specific point I was making with the example.

Because we are rational animals, we can conceptualizewhat it is like to be a bat, and can go on to wonder what it would be like.  We can even positively want to know what it would be like.  At the same time, given that our perceptual apparatus is by nature so different from that of a bat, we cannot in fact know this.  And being rational, we can know that we can’t know it.  Hence, we can judge both that in some sense it would be desirable to know this and that it is not a kind of knowledge that is “in the cards” for us.  Because it is not, we don’t judge this lack of knowledge to be a loss or incompleteness in our nature, the way that we would judge, say, the lack of vision as a loss or lack of completeness (since it is part of our nature to be able to see).

The example is meant to illustrate the idea that a rational creature can in some sense desire to know something and yet at the same time not regard the impossibility of fulfilling that desire as a loss or a lack of completion.  And this parallels human beings in a state of pure nature who, being rational creatures and knowing God as first principle of the world, can go on to wonder what it would be like directly to apprehend the very essence of God.  At the same time, they would judge that that kind of knowledge is simply not one that is open to us – that it is “above our pay grade,” metaphysically and epistemologically speaking – and thus they would not experience this incapacity as a loss or an imperfection. 

It is true that knowledge of the divine essence is incomparably more significant than knowledge of bat phenomenology, but, again, that is simply irrelevant to the specific point of the analogy.  You would no doubt respond, as you do in your reply, that any rational nature would have to regard the incapacity for the beatific vision as a loss or an imperfection.  But that simply reasserts your position against mine, without arguingfor it; that is to say, it begs the question.  You might then go on (as indeed you do in your reply) to say that this is simply not a “sane” position to take, and warn that I “will lose the debate” if I take it.  But this merely adds foot-stomping to the question-begging. 

It is also false to claim that my analogy fails insofar as learning what it is like to be a bat would require replacing one nature with another – viz. human nature with bat nature – and thus make your point for you.  That is clearly not the case.  Our nature is to be rational animals.  And if, super-naturally, the capacity for a bat-like echolocation were added to our existing repertoire of animal capacities, we would still have the nature of rational animals (and not the nature of bats, which are of their nature non-rational).  Once again, my analogy, when one is careful to note exactly what it is intended (and not intended) to illustrate, is perfectly fine.

Pantheism

OK, so let’s get to the pantheism business.  One thing I need to emphasize from the get-go is that I was, of course, not attributing to you everything that the Stoics, Spinoza, or Hegel believed.  I was not characterizing you as a “synthesis of all pantheists” or the like.  I was merely making the point that you do say things that echo some of the distinctively pantheist themes of each of these thinkers, even if you put your own twist on them and wouldn’t endorse everything they say.  Hence, to note that you differ from the Stoics in this way, from Spinoza in that way, from Hegel in this other way, and so on, is not to the point.  Yes, of course you’re not a Stoic pantheist, a Spinozist pantheist, or a Hegelian pantheist.  You’re a David Bentley Hart pantheist.  Hence, still a pantheist.

To be sure, “pantheism” is a label that has been applied to a pretty broad range of thinkers, from Vedantists to Parmenides to Marcus Aurelius to John Scotus Eriugena to Spinoza to Hegel to Einstein to Deepak Chopra.  But not anything goes.  The boundaries may be fuzzy, but they are not non-existent.  Hence it will not do for you to say, in response to the charge of pantheism, that it is a label you “can neither reject nor accept, since it is meaningless.”  And in fact that is different from what you conceded just a couple of years ago, when, during an earlier exchange of ours, you said:

The accusation of pantheism troubles me not in the least.  For one thing, it’s a vague word used of far too many different things.  But there are many ways in which I would proudly wear the title…  I am quite happy to be accused of pantheism – or of paganism, monism, syncretism, Hinduism, panpsychism, and so on, since I regard none of those labels as opprobrious.

End quote.  So, we have it on the expert testimony of one David Bentley Hart that David Bentley Hart is (some kind of) pantheist.  Indeed, even in this latest reply, you concede: “But, yes, you have me, I am a metaphysical monist.”  So which is it?  “Oh please, don’t fling the silly ‘pantheist” charge!” or “Damn right I’m a pantheist, wanna make something of it?”  Pick a strategy and stick with it!

True, you go on to claim that you are in this regard merely placing yourself in the tradition of “Eriugena, Eckhart, and Cusanus, [and] also drawing from Gregory and Maximus.”  But (putting aside issues about how these various thinkers ought to be interpreted) saying “They’re ‘pantheists’ too!” is very different from denying the charge of pantheism.  I cannot help but wonder if you are being a bit coy lest too frank an acknowledgement of your pantheism might alienate those among your readers for whom that would be a bridge too far.  But I’d urge you to let your Yes be Yes and your No, No.  Anything else is from the marketing department.  (Not that I think you care about selling books.  But I do think you care about selling ideas.)

As I emphasized in my aforementioned reply to your namesake, the lens through which I am viewing the pantheism question is – you will be utterly unsurprised to hear – that provided by the First Vatican Council and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century papal teaching and its Neo-Scholastic inspiration.  There are, for example, these bracing passages from the Council:

If anyone says that finite things, both corporal and spiritual, or at any rate, spiritual, emanated from the divine substance; or that the divine essence, by the manifestation and evolution of itself becomes all things… let him be anathema.

If anyone… holds that God did not create by his will free from all necessity, but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself… let him be anathema.

There is Pius X’s Pascendi, which takes “the identity of man with God” to be the chief note of pantheism.  There is Pius XI’s Mit Brennender Sorge, which identifies “raising the world to the dimensions of God” as a variety of pantheism.  And so on. 

Now, in You Are Gods, you say that because we are capable of a supernatural end, human beings “must be divine – ‘naturally’” and “must always already have been divine,” so that “our being in God and God’s being in us are both also and more originally God’s being as God.”  You say that “creation… [is] revealed as being ‘located’ nowhere but within the very life of God as God.”  You say that “creation inevitably follows from who [God] is.”  You say that “nothing in nature or history can be simply extrinsic to this movement of the Father’s ‘achievement’ of his own essence in the divine life.”  You say that:

Only the God who is always already human can become human.  Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God… God is all that is.  Whatever is not God exists as becoming divine, and as such is God in the mode of what is other than God.

And so on.  I quote other relevant remarks in my review.  Surely no one reading this needs to do the math, least of all you.  If pantheism includes the sorts of things condemned by the Council and the popes, thenyour position is clearly pantheistic.  At the very least, it “savors of pantheism,” as Pius X would say.

You would no doubt respond, as you do in your reply, that “I do not believe in the organs of authority that you believe in.”  I know that.  That’s not the point.  I don’t for a moment expect you to give up your pantheism simply because the Piuses condemned it.  But I do not think it is too much to ask for you frankly to acknowledge that your position is indeed exactly the sort of thing they condemned.  You would lose some Catholic readers – and (I cannot tell a lie) I think that is why you don’t just come out and admit the obvious – but the true nature of the dispute between us would be clearer.

It is also no good for the 1,234th time to rattle off a list of the Mighty Dead, as if the mere incantation forced them to testify on your behalf.  The devil knows scripture, and he knows the Fathers too.  I daresay he’s even read them in the original Greek and Latin.  What they said is one thing, and what you say they meant is not necessarily the same thing.  Take the theosis of Irenaeus and Athanasius, which held a powerful attraction for me when I began to reconsider Christianity after years of being an atheist (and still does).  I would interpret it in a Thomistic way, which preserves the sharp distinction between creature and creator.  You would no doubt regard such an interpretation as anachronistic and superficial, missing the deep (cough pantheistic cough) meaning implicit in these Fathers, even if unrealized by them.  Who is right?  Merely citing them is not going to answer that question.  The same is true of thinkers you regard as more obviously supporting your side, such as Gregory.  Precisely because you and I both regard them as incorporable within our respective positions, merely name-checking them cuts no ice.

Orthodoxy

Now, the question is, in part, a question of what is an orthodox reading of such thinkers.  In my review, I quoted a number of lines from You Are Gods evidencing your rejection of traditional criteria of Christian orthodoxy – and your appeal to extra-Christian sources as if they were equal in authority, or in some cases perhaps even of greater insight, than some Christian sources.  On the one hand, you quibble with some of the details of what I say.  For example, when I note with disapproval that you suggest that Christian thinkers “have a great deal to learn” from Vedanta, you respond:

And?  Would you raise objections to the term “Neoplatonic Christianity?”  Would you have resisted the use of Platonism by the early Christians?  How about Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism by Thomas?  Would Thomas’s reliance on a Muslim philosopher like ibn Sina have horrified you?

But once again you have missed the point.  I am, of course, happy to learn from Vedanta, and from Neoplatonism, Avicenna, and (for that matter) my electrician and the guy who does my taxes.  But here’s one thing we are not going to learn from Vedanta: what Christianity is. 

On the other hand, the main point I was making in that section of the review is one that you basically concede.  In your reply, you write: “I admit that what others consider orthodoxy is not my primary concern” and “I do not care whether what I say fits a particular definition of orthodoxy.”

Well, here’s one problem with that.  It’s not entirely true.  For you do not present the position you develop in You Are Godsas merely inspired by Christian writers, alongside others.  You present it as the Christian position, and you condemn rivals like Neo-Scholastic Thomism as positively contrary to Christian teaching.  Similarly, in That All Shall Be Saved, you presented your universalism as Christian teaching full stop, and dismissed rival positions like Thomism and Calvinism as simply getting Christianity wrong.  (Indeed, it even seems, at least in those moments, that perhaps you envy the Piuses their authority to issue anathemas!)

So, it appears to me that you have a tendency to speak out of both sides of your mouth.  When it suits your purposes, you are happy to play the orthodoxy card against your opponents.  When accused of flouting orthodoxy yourself, it’s suddenly: “Orthodoxy schmorthodoxy, let a thousand flowers bloom!”  That’s the sort of rhetoric that may work well with people who are into rhetoric of that sort.  But logicallyspeaking… well, I don’t need to finish the sentence.

Hence, when you admonish me: “Do not arrogate to yourself the right to speak for Christian tradition in general” and “there are more things in Christianity… than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” what else can I say but: Right back atcha, David. 

Except that our positions are not really at a stalemate at this point, since I really do believe that there is such a thing as orthodoxy and that there are objective criteria by which that can be determined.  You, I think, do not.  I suspect that the traditional Catholic-Orthodox-Protestant debates over the sources of authority bore you.  I gather that, when the term “modernism” enters the discussion, you’ll offer an impatient sigh, with a side order of eye rolls.  But, when pressed, you’ll concede that yes, at least where questions about the authority of tradition, the history of dogma, and the like are concerned, your sympathies are with thinkers of the sort condemned in Pascendi.  Stop me when I‘m getting warm.

So, while you may think I get Christianity wrong, I am most certainly trying to get it right.  I don’t think you are doing that, not fundamentally anyway.  You admitted as much in That All Shall Be Saved, where you suggested that if it should turn out that your universalism really is inconsistent with Christianity, you would give up Christianity rather than universalism – appealing to your own “conscience,” against which, you say, “the authority of a dominant tradition… has no weight whatever.”

Hence what you defend in that book and in the new one, I would suggest, is not really Christianity itself, but rather a personal theology that takes certain Christian thinkers as key sources of inspiration.  It is, at the end of the day, essentially David Bentley Hartism.  And so, I agree with you when you say that “for all intents and purposes, we profess different faiths.”

Well, that’s basically it.  I appreciate the good sportsmanship of your reply, your kind words about my philosophy of mind book, and the kind words you have had elsewhere for Five Proofs of the Existence of God.  As you know, I admire your own books Atheist Delusions and The Experience of God, and I know that they have meant a lot to some of my own readers.  It is where we get into matters of more specific Christian concern that we, and our readers, begin to diverge.  That is regrettable, but there it is.

The big book on the soul that I am currently working on is one that mostly deals with matters on which our sympathies converge.  And so, I think that for the most part you will like it.  Except for the section on the postmortem fixity of the will, which you will hate. 

May God bless you too.

Best,

Ed

Tales from the Coffin

In my recent post criticizing Benevacantism, I deliberately avoided naming specific individuals, in the hope of preventing the debate from degenerating into a clash of personalities.  I also said: “I make no judgment here about the culpability of those drawn to this error, many of whom are well-meaning people understandably troubled by the state of the Church and the world.”  Unfortunately, not everyone is keen on keeping the discussion civil or focused on arguments and evidence.

Patrick Coffin, the longtime Catholic apologist, has in recent months been promoting Benevacantism.  I’ve known Patrick for years and have counted him a friend.  He has kindly had me on his show a few times.  Despite all that, he has decided to take the low road in responding to my arguments.  After Catholic World Report reprinted my article, he posted the following remark on Twitter:

Evidence-aphobia. @IgnatiusPress which runs @cworldreport, also owns the rights to Benedict/Ratzinger's English translations (which are great, btw). Must. Protect. The ca$h cow.

End quote.  When I objected to this unjust, uncharitable, and utterly gratuitous resort to the fallacy of Appeal to Motive, Patrick doubled down:

Calm down, Ed. It's not mysterious but *obvious* that you'd want to defend those who publish your books (which are excellent, btw), & understandable that they'd want to repost your criticism. Boy howdy, does pointing out financial conflicts of interest get people mad.

End quote.  So, in Patrick’s view, sincere disagreement with the arguments for Benevacantism and grave concerns about its schismatic implications are not enough to explain why I and the people at CWR are opposed to it.  It must, deep down, really be about money.  And if I object to such an accusation, it can’t be because I regard the accusation as grossly unfair.  It must be because he’s struck a nerve.

Needless to say, this is unhinged, and reminiscent of that other Catholic apologist to have gone off the rails, Mark Shea.  I pointed this out to Patrick, who responded:

Taking refuge in insults and condescension when you run out of arguments is sad from a professional philosopher. I'm glad you haven't gone ad hominem or anything. I'll let readers decide what's what and where the fallacies lie. Peace.

End quote.  Thus did this exchange lead us at last to Bizarro world, where to object to a condescending, insulting ad hominem attack itself somehow amounts to a condescending, insulting ad hominem attack against the guilty party.

I note also that, though in some of his Twitter comments on my article, Patrick once again calls his readers’ attention to the considerations that he thinks support Benevacantism, he has not responded to the specific objections I raised in the article.

All of this pretty much speaks for itself.  I will simply emphasize that if the arguments for Benevacantism are as strong as Patrick supposes, he should be able to defend them without gratuitously insulting a friend who has approached the issue in a civil manner.

Benevacantism is scandalous and pointless

In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies , David Stove observes that an argument once given by philosopher of science Imré Lakatos “manages to be scandalous and pointless at the same time” (p. 8).  He was referring to Lakatos’s having made use of certain historical examples, some of the details of which Lakatos admitted he had made up himself.  The idea is that, as bad as dishonest scholarship is, worse still is defeating the whole purpose by admitting that that is what you are doing.  I put aside for present purposes the question of whether Stove’s characterization of Lakatos was actually fair.  What I’m interested in here is the general idea of a position that is simultaneously scandalous and pointless.

I can’t help but think of Stove’s remark when I consider the growing fad in some conservative Catholic circles for “Benevacantism” – the theory that Benedict XVI is still pope, so that Francis is an antipope.  (The word is a portmanteau derived from “Benedict” and “sedevacantism.”  Which doesn’t really make much sense, given that the view does not claim that there is currently no pope, as sedevacantism does.  Some people prefer other labels, such as “resignationism” or “Beneplenism,” for reasons you can google if you’d like.)

You might think the view too silly to be worth commenting on.  But there are two reasons for doing so, namely that it is scandalous and that it is pointless.  It is scandalous insofar as those promoting it are leading Catholics into the grave sin of schism, i.e. refusing due submission to the Roman Pontiff, who (like it or not) is in fact Francis.  And while it is the view of only a small minority, some of them are influential.  I make no judgment here about the culpability of those drawn to this error, many of whom are well-meaning people understandably troubled by the state of the Church and the world.  But that it is an error, there can be no reasonable doubt.

That brings me to the other reason for commenting on Benevacantism, which is that it is pointless.  In particular, the view is incoherent, and indeed self-defeating, but in a way that seems to me to be philosophically interesting.  To see how, let’s begin by calling to mind the motivationpeople have for wanting Benevacantism to be true (as contrasted with the arguments they give for it – I’ll come to those in a moment). 

It is not news that Pope Francis has, over the years, made a number of theologically problematic statements (about Holy Communion for those living in adulterous relationships, capital punishment, and other matters) and done a number of problematic things (such as reversing Benedict’s motu proprio on the Latin Mass).  I’ve addressed these controversies many times before and am not going to rehash it all here.  The point to emphasize for present purposes is that Benevacantists suppose that the problem posed by Francis’s questionable statements and actions can be dissolved if it were to turn out that Benedict is still pope.  For in that case, the problematic statements were not made by a true pope, so that there is no need to explain howa pope could commit such errors.

Now, one problem here is that this “solution” is simply unnecessary.  The Church has always acknowledged that popes can err when not speaking ex cathedra, and whatever else one thinks of Francis’s controversial statements and actions, they all would, if erroneous, fall into the category of possible papal error.  Francis may have said and done more theologically dubious things than the best-known popes of the past who have done so (such as Honorius and John XXII), but they are dubious statements and actions of the same basic kind.  The problem is extremely serious, but again, it’s within the boundaries of what the Church and her faithful theologians have always acknowledged could happen, consistent with the clearly defined conditions for papal teaching being infallible.  (I’ve addressed this issue in detail elsewhere, such as hereand here.)

But that’s not primarily what I’m talking about when I say that Benevacantism is pointless.  To understand that we need to understand the arguments for the view.  In 2016, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, personal secretary to Benedict XVI, gave a now-famous speech wherein he said that the pope’s resignation had created an “expanded” Petrine office with two members, an “active” one and a “contemplative” one.  The Petrine “munus” – which can mean “ministry” or “service, duty, guide or gift” – is, the archbishop said, therefore something Benedict still participates in even after resigning.  Indeed, his acceptance of the office of the papacy in 2005 was “irrevocable.”  This, Gänswein said, is why it is appropriate that he retains his papal name, still wears papal white garments, and remains within the Vatican.

Given how close Gänswein is to Benedict, these remarks were widely understood to reflect the Pope Emeritus’s own views.  And it is completely unsurprising that they raised everyone’s eyebrows – and, as it happens, a few people’s hopes.  For they seem to imply that, despite his resignation, Benedict may in some sense think of himself as still holding the papal office, at least in part.  And this has given rise to at least two different versions of Benevacantism, which rest on two different theories about how the views conveyed by Gänswein purportedly cast doubt on the validity of Benedict’s resignation.  They go as follows:

Theory 1: Benedict didn’t really intend to resign.  According to this theory, Benedict distinguishes the munus of the papacy (in the sense of the office itself and its duties), from the ministerium or actual exercise of the powers of the office.  What Benedict renounced, according to this theory, is only the latter and not the former.  That is to say, he retains the munus of the papacy, but decided to turn the ministerium over to another, who ended up being Francis.  Francis, for this reason, is said by Gänswein to be the “active” member of this expanded papal office.  But Benedict, who now retains only a “contemplative” role, is still the one who in the strict sense holds the munus and thus the papacy.

Theory 2: Benedict did intend to resign, but failed.  According to this alternative theory, Benedict did indeed intend flatly to resign the papacy.  But since he holds the views reported by Gänswein, he did not succeed in validly doing so.  The reason is that the functions of the papal office simply cannot be divided in the way Benedict, according to the theory, supposes they can be.  Hence his resignation was predicated on a false understanding of what he was doing, and that invalidates it.  He is therefore still pope.

Now, I don’t think either of these theories is plausible for a moment.  But let’s pretend they were.  Would they solve the problem they are intended to solve – that is to say, the problem of having to deal with a genuine pope who says and does theologically highly problematic things?  Not in the least, which is why I say Benevacantism is pointless. 

Suppose theory 1 were true.  Then Francis would be something like Benedict’s viceroy, acting on his behalf and with his authority.  His words and actions would have whatever authority they had precisely insofar as he acts in Benedict’s name, and in effect would therefore be Benedict’swords and actions, especially if Benedict did nothing to correct them.  (Call to mind here Aquinas’s teaching in Summa Theologiae II-II.182that the active life “serves rather than commands” the contemplative, which is superior to it.  Hence, if the papacy really were divided into “contemplative” and “active” members, the latter would be the instrument of the former.)

Surely the difficulty here is obvious.  It would follow that Francis’s problematic words and actions too would, in effect, be Benedict’s problematic words and actions.  Hence this first version of Benevacantism would do nothing at all to solve the problem of how a pope could say and do the problematic things Francis has done.  It would merely relocate responsibility for these problematic words and actions from Francis to Benedict.  Indeed, it would make the situation worse, because you would not only have a pope who is ultimately responsible for the problematic words and actions in question, but one who also, on top of that, allows the faithful to be confused about who exactly the pope really is.  Benevacantists think of Benedict as a better pope than Francis, but in fact this first version of their theory would entail that he is a worse pope.

Suppose instead we went with theory 2.  This is hardly better; indeed, it may even be worse still.  For one thing, on this scenario too, Benedict does not turn out to be a better defender of orthodoxy than Francis is.  Rather, the theory would make him out to be such an incompetent and unreliable defender of orthodoxy that he would not even understand the nature of the papacy itself, which is supposed to be the ultimate bulwark of orthodoxy.  Indeed, he would be so incompetent and unreliable that he would not even know who the pope really is, and that it is precisely he himself who is still pope.  He would, in effect, be in schism from himself, and guilty of subordinating himself and the rest of the faithful to an antipope!

This would be a superior guardian of orthodoxy than Francis?  Seriously?

But it gets worse.  Suppose one of these two versions of Benevacantism were true.  What is the Church supposed to do?  Presumably, on the best case scenario, Benedict himself would publicly endorse some version of the theory.  But that would be a disaster.  If he endorsed theory 1, he would in effect be saying that he has silently allowed the Church to be gravely misled and misgoverned for almost a decade – that he has been pope all along but has failed to carry out his duties as pope, and done so on the basis of a novel theological theory that has no ground or precedent in the historical teaching of the Church.  Why, in that case, should any Catholic trust him or his magisterium ever again?  And of course, millions of Catholics would not trust him, nor would they accept this shocking claim, and would continue to recognize Francis as pope.  This would entail a schism unprecedented in Church history, with no clear means of resolution.

Suppose instead that Benedict came to endorse theory 2, and made an announcement to that effect: “Hey, listen up everyone, it turns out I am still pope after all!  No one is more surprised about this than I am, but there it is.  I hereby immediately resume my duties and command Francis to step aside.”  Why should anyone regard this judgment as any more sound than the earlier judgment he made to the effect that he was no longer pope?  In which case, again, why should any Catholic ever trust him or his magisterium again?  And here too, millions of Catholics would not accept this announcement, but would judge that he had gone crazy and continue to follow Francis.  Again, we’d be stuck with an unprecedented and irresolvable schism.

Or suppose – as, it goes without saying, is the far more likely scenario – that Benedict goes to his grave without endorsing any version of Benevacantism.  What then?  If he dies before Francis, how are we ever supposed to get a validly elected pope ever again, given that so many of the current cardinals have been appointed by Francis, whom Benevacantists claim to be an antipope?  We would be stuck with all the problems facing sedevacantism.  And things would hardly be any better if Francis dies before Benedict while Benedict continues to maintain that he is no longer pope.

To call Benevacantism half-baked would be too generous.  It is a complete theological mess.  It offers no solution whatsoever to the problems posed by Pope Francis’s controversial words and actions, and in fact makes things much worse.  And on top of that it leads Catholics into the grave sin of schism.  Hence, as I say, it is both scandalous and pointless at the same time.

It is also a non-starter even apart from all that, because there can be no reasonable doubt that Benedict validly resigned.  Canon 332 §2 of the Code of Canon Law tells us:

If it happens that the Roman Pontiff resigns his office, it is required for validity that the resignation is made freely and properly manifested but not that it is accepted by anyone.

Now, Benedict publicly and freely resigned his office, and has publicly reaffirmed that his decision was taken freely, in answer to those who have speculated otherwise.  He has also explicitly acknowledged that there is only one pope and that it is Francis.  His resignation thus clearly meets the criteria for validity set out by canon law.  End of story.

Some have suggested that the resignation cannot have been made freely because, they say, it was done under the influence of an erroneous theory of the papacy, namely the one described by Gänswein.  But this is a non sequitur, as any Catholic should know who is familiar with the conditions for a sin to be mortal – grave matter, full knowledge, and deliberate consent.  My point isn’t that Benedict’s resignation was sinful, but rather that these conditions illustrate the general point that the Church distinguishes acting with full knowledge and acting with deliberate consent or freely.  And canon law makes only the latter, and not the former, a condition for the validity of a papal resignation.  Hence, even if Benedict’s resignation was made under the influence of an erroneous theological theory about the papacy, that would be irrelevant to its having been made freely and thus validly.

Some will nevertheless insist that Benedict did not act freely, because they speculate that he was being blackmailed or otherwise acting in fear.  But he has publicly denied this, and after nine years no one has offered any evidence that it is true.  Note also that canon law says that it is not necessary that a resignation be “accepted by anyone” in order for it to be valid.  Hence neither Benedict nor anyone else is under any obligation to prove to the satisfaction of Benevacantists that his resignation was valid in order for it actually to be valid.

But what about the views reported by Gänswein?  If they really are Benedict’s, don’t they cast at least some doubt on his resignation?  No, not at all.  They are merely the personal opinions of a man who is now just a private theologian, who apparently believes that his novel office of “Pope Emeritus” is in some respects analogous to, and even inherits some of the dignity and functions of, the separate office of the papacy – an office he no longer holds, and which he has acknowledged he no longer holds.  One might accept his theory about the nature of the office of “Pope Emeritus” or reject it, but that is irrelevant to whether Benedict validly resigned.  And it remains irrelevant even if Benedict believed this theory prior to resigning, for then too it would have been nothing more than Benedict’s private theological opinion rather than an official teaching of the Church.

Francis, and Francis alone, is the pope.  You may lament this, but it is reality.  And the first step in dealing with some reality you don’t like is to face it, rather than retreating into fantasy.

Two Harts beaten as one

At the blog Jesus and the Ancient Paths, PhD student Seth Hart defends his namesake David Bentley Hart against the objections I raised in my Public Discourse review of the latter Hart’s new book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature .  What follows is a response to the former Hart’s four lines of criticism.  In case you are wondering, the article informs us that there is no relation between the two Harts.  To avoid confusion, I’ll mostly refer to them as “S. Hart” and “D. B. Hart” in what follows.  I am, in any event, thrilled by the prospect of some new cringeworthy puns.

Thin skin for me, but not for thee

D. B. Hart’s predilection for gratuitous invective is so central and well-known a feature of his style that no reviewer can entirely avoid mentioning it – any more than the reviewer of a Steely Dan album can avoid discussion of production values and jazz influences, or any more than the reviewer of a David Mamet movie can avoid a reference to Pinteresque dialogue.  At the same time, the topic of Hart’s rhetoric is at this point so hackneyed and boring that, unless there is some special reason for discussing it, a passing reference is all that is called for. 

Hence, in my review I devoted only a single paragraph (out of 26) to citing some choice examples from the new book – primarily to illustrate the implausibility of Hart’s claim to “disinterestedness,” though also to indicate how much heavy lifting abusive rhetoric is really doing given that Hart does not even mention, much less respond to (as a truly scholarly book on his topic should have), the actual arguments of specific contemporary Thomists such as Feingold, Long, and Hütter.  Having done that, I devoted the rest of the review to more interesting and substantive matters.

But even this mild, passing, unavoidable reference to D. B. Hart’s rhetoric was too much for S. Hart, who judges it “petty,” and indeed among the “rather extreme examples” (!) of the foibles of a review so “weak” and “egregious” that it reads like an “an April Fool’s joke” (!)  The elder Hart’s stream of vituperation, we are assured, is in reality “rather tame” and indeed “quite playful.”  And here we see that curious combination of psychological traits so often observed in the D. B. Hart fan base – frothy-mouthed relish of every insult Hart tosses at an opponent, coupled with lemon-juice-on-paper-cut hypersensitivity at the slightest criticism of the Master himself.  Not being a psychiatrist or spiritual director, I cannot claim entirely to understand the complex.  Anyway, at the moment I’m less interested in discussing D. B. Hart’s rhetoric than S. Hart is, so let’s move on.

Laptop lacuna?

In my review, I used the analogy of a laptop computer in order to illustrate the idea of an obediential potency.  I trust that most readers don’t need to be reminded that an analogy doesn’t need to be perfect in order to make some narrow point, and that only certain features of the analogues are playing a role in an analogy.  For example, when Christ compares himself to a thief in the night (Matthew 24:43; Revelation 16:15), the fact that thievery is sinful is irrelevant to the specific point of the analogy.  Hence it would be inept to object to the analogy on the grounds that Christ could not sin.  The disciples would have to have been pretty thick to respond: “Lord, how can you compare yourself to a criminal?  Is this an April Fool’s joke?”

In the case of the laptop computer analogy, the point was just this.  There is an obvious sense in which the laptop, considered just by itself and without anything you might connect to it, is complete.  You might in principle use it for years without ever plugging anything into one of the USB ports or downloading new applications, without it ever malfunctioning or otherwise failing to do what it was designed to do.  This was meant to be analogous to the notion of natura puraor “pure nature.”  Had human beings never been offered the supernatural end of the beatific vision, there is a sense in which they would have been complete as long as they had the natural knowledge of God available via philosophical argument and the like.

At the same time, the laptop is designed in such a way that you could add software and equipment to it in a way that would make it capable of doing things that would not otherwise be possible.  For example, you could download movie playing software, a speaker system, and the like, in order to make of it a home entertainment system.  These additions would have to come from outside the existing system; just using the software already on the machine wouldn’t do it.  At the same time, there is something about the computer itself that makes such upgrading possible, such as the presence of USB ports, the fact that it has a sufficiently powerful operating system, and so on.  (For example, you could not download existing software of the kind in question on an old Commodore computer or Apple II Plus.)

This was meant to parallel the idea that divine causality operating on human nature from outside can raise us to the possibility of the beatific vision, but that there also nevertheless already has to be somethingpresent in human nature to makes us suitable for such elevation, namely our rationality.  Non-human animals are not capable even in principle of being raised to the beatific vision, not even by divine action, precisely because they lack rationality.  They are analogous to computer systems that have not been constructed with any means of adding on to them new hardware or software.

Obviously, I am not saying that human beings are in any otherrespect analogous to laptop computers, any more than Christ was saying that he is in any other respect like a thief.  And of course, the analogy is not perfect.  In the nature of the case, you are never going to find perfect analogies for the supernatural in the natural order.  But it is a good enough analogy to make the specific point I was trying to make – that something can in one sense be completeeven if at the same time it can also be raised to a higher end, and only because of something already built into it.  And having something already built-in that makes it possible for a thing to go beyond its operations as an already complete instance of its kind is what having an “obediential potency” involves.

If you want to criticize the analogy, that’s fine.  But I fail to see in it the “April Fool’s joke” level of stupidity S. Hart hyperbolically attributes to it.  Certainly his specific objections draw no blood.  Yes, as he notes, human beings are true substances with intrinsic teleology, whereas computers are mere artifacts with extrinsic teleology.  So what?  How does that affect the specific point of the analogy, any more than the fact that thievery is sinful and Christ sinless undermines our Lord’s analogy?  It is good enough for the narrow purposes of the analogy that computers have the relatively stable (even if extrinsic) teleology that longstanding artefactual kinds have, and that some of the specific applications and equipment that could be added to them later might not be foreseen by the designers at the time they were designed.

It is true that Aristotelian-Thomist philosophers (myself included) often hammer on the sharp difference between true substances and artifacts.  But the A-T position does not entail that we can draw no interesting analogies whatsoever between true substances and artifacts, and I know of no A-T writer who would say such a ridiculous thing.  To insist that apples and oranges are different does not commit you never to acknowledging any similarity at all between the two.

S. Hart writes:

Feser’s example seems to only prove Hart’s point.  The very fact that laptops have USB ports and the capacity to download new software means that their creators intended their further upgrading.  In a sense, they are teleologically directed toward the further actualization of their various features.

End quote.  The problem with this is that though the laptop’s creators intended further upgrading in a general way, what is relevant for the specific purposes of the analogy is that (a) there is nevertheless a sense in which the laptop is complete as it is, and (b) there might be some particular upgrade that was not intended by the creators – for example, a specific app that was not invented at the time the laptop was made.  The USB ports and downloading capacities leave the laptop open to upgrades in a general way, but without aiming specifically at that upgrade in particular.  Similarly, rationality leaves human nature open in a general way to the possibility of a supernatural end such as the beatific vision, but without actually aiming at it in particular.

Bat analogy or bad analogy?

I also borrowed Thomas Nagel’s famous example of our being unable to know what it is like to be a bat, in order to make a different, if related, point.  Rational beings that we are, we can raise the question of what it is like to be a bat.  At the same time, we might judge that this particular kind of experiential knowledge is not possible for us, given that we and bats have such very different physiological natures.  Because it is not a kind of knowledge we are “built for” in the first place, we need not experience this inability as a deprivation, the way people do experience the inability to see or hear, or the loss of a limb, as deprivations. 

By analogy, even if human beings in a state of “pure nature” could raise the question of what it would be to have direct knowledge of the divine essence, they might still judge that this is simply not possible for beings of our limited rational nature.  And if so, they would not regard the impossibility of achieving the beatific vision by our natural powers as a deprivation, any more than they would experience the impossibility of knowing what it is like to be a bat as a deprivation.  (That is, of course, not for a moment to suggest that the inability to know what it is like to be a bat is remotely as significant as the inability to achieve the beatific vision.  That is not the point of the analogy.)

S. Hart’s objection to this is that, from my own A-T point of view, I would have to agree that contemplation of the forms or natures of things is the highest form of knowledge.  Yet knowledge of what it is like to be a bat has nothing to do with knowing its form.  Therefore (Hart’s conclusion seems to me, as far as I can follow the convoluted discussion of this passage from his article), my bat analogy fails.

The problem with this is that the analogy would fail only if I was claiming that the specific way that (a) knowing what it is like to be a bat is analogous to (b) the beatific visionis that they both involve knowledge of the form or nature of a thing.  But I made no such claim.  I claimed only that they both involve knowledge of somekind or other.

For my specific purposes, the analogy requires only the following parallel between the two cases.  Because we, like bats, are capable of sensory experience (considered as a general mode of cognition), we can raise the question of what it is like to be a bat, but without actually being aimed by nature toward that specific (bat-like) sort of experiential knowledge.  That’s why our ability to raise the question does not entail a sense of deprivation.  Similarly, as rational creatures, human beings in a state of “pure nature,” like human beings to whom the supernatural end of the beatific vision has actually been given, can raise the question of what it would be to have direct knowledge of the divine essence.  But because those in a state of “pure nature” are nevertheless not directed naturally toward such knowledge, it does not follow that they would experience that inability as a deprivation. 

Pantheism schmantheism

S. Hart isn’t too keen on my characterization of D. B. Hart as a pantheist.  He begins his criticism as follows:

Feser finally accuses Hart of collapsing God and world into an undifferentiated unity, committing him to pantheistic heresy.  Indeed, there are points in isolation that seem to suggest this, such as the line, “God is all that is.”  However, Hart is nearly always quick to qualify this response.  In this case, he follows it with, “Whatever is not God exists as becoming divine, and as such is God in the mode of what is other than God.  But God is not ‘the other’ of anything.” 

End quote.  So far, then, S. Hart’s defense of D. B. Hart against the charge of pantheism seems to be:  “True, that first unambiguous statement sure looks like pantheism – but hey, check out this second, clear-as-mud statement!”  Not promising.  But actually, there’s more, so let’s move on.  S. Hart then writes:

There is, then, a nonidentical relationship between God and creation, though such a distinction is much more fluid than anything Feser will allow. 

End quote.  How S. Hart can be so sure of this, I have no idea.  After all, in the line cited as mitigating the pantheism, D. B. Hart says that what is (only seemingly?) not God actually “is God in the mode of what is other than God” and that “God is not ‘the other’ of anything.”  Which sounds to me like a God-world collapse after all, as far as I can make anything of it.  If there’s any wiggle room here, though, that’s not because D. B. Hart has been more precise than I let on in my review, but precisely because he is so imprecise.  Anyway, to continue on with S. Hart:

[Feser] thus compares Hart to Spinoza, apparently unaware or unconvinced by Carlyle’s reevaluation of Spinoza as a panentheist…

As further proof, Feser cites Hart’s positive treatment of Advaita and Vishishtadvaita Vedantic thought, apparently unaware that “Vishishtadvaita” means qualified nondualism.  These very qualifications prevent any flat identity of God and world.

End quote.  Well, yes, Seth, I know what “Vishishtadvaita” means, but thanks for the free lesson.  I also know something our erudite grad student appears not to, viz. that “pantheism” is, historically, a very fluid concept.  It needn’t always entail “an undifferentiated unity” (to borrow S. Hart’s phrase) but can include doctrines that allow for some kind of differentiation between God and the world even while affirming an ultimate unity between them.  That’s precisely why everyone from Vedanta thinkers to Parmenides to Marcus Aurelius to John Scotus Eriugena to Spinoza to Hegel to Einstein to Deepak Chopra have – rightly or wrongly, and despite their important differences – all sometimes been classified as pantheists.  If you check out the old Catholic Encyclopediaarticle on pantheism, you’ll see that it emphasizes the great diversity of forms of pantheism, opines that there probably has been no pure form of pantheism, and proposes that the key notes common to the varieties of doctrine labeled “pantheist” are as follows:

• Reality is a unitary being; individual things have no absolute independence – they have existence in the All-One, the ens realissimum et et perfectissimum of which they are the more or less independent members;

• The All-One manifests itself to us, so far as it has any manifestations, in the two sides of reality-nature and history;

• The universal interaction that goes on in the physical world is the showing forth of the inner aesthetic teleological necessity with which the All-One unfolds his essential being in a multitude of harmonious modifications, a cosmos of concrete ideas (monads, entelechies).  This internal necessity is at the same time absolute freedom or self-realization.

End quote.  Now, I submit that D. B. Hart’s position is pretty clearly pantheist by the Catholic Encyclopedia’s standard.  (Indeed, some of that gauzy passage almost sounds like Hart could have written it.)  And this is extremely important from the point of view of Catholic theology, because the Encyclopediareflects what Catholic writers had in mind by “pantheism” in the era when Pope Pius IX, the First Vatican Council, Pope St. Pius X, Pope Pius XI, and Pope Pius XII repeatedly made a point of condemning pantheism as a clear and present danger.

Naturally, I am well aware that philosophers of religion and theologians these days prefer to draw sharper terminological boundaries between “pantheism,” “panentheism,” and so on.  However, being the card-carrying reactionary unreconstructed Baroque Scholastic manualist Thomist that I am, I am more interested in what the Catholic theological tradition has had in view when analyzing and criticizing pantheism.  And I think it is pretty obvious that Hart’s views fall within the range of doctrines that Pius IX, Vatican I, Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, et al. would condemn as “pantheist.”

I don’t think D. B. Hart would deny this; on the contrary, I think he’d wear it as a badge of honor, at least in private when knocking back a few drinks with the posse.  Certainly he is not shy in You Are Gods about the fact that his views cannot be reconciled with what was hammered out as official Catholic teaching on matters of nature and supernature by the time of Pius XII. 

It is also rather rich for S. Hart to accuse me, out of one side of his mouth, of being insufficiently precise in my analogies – while, out of the other side of his mouth, approvingly citing D. B. Hart’s imprecise and inconsistent formulations as evidence that he ought to be acquitted of the charge of pantheism.  Rich, but not in the least surprising, given that “Heads, Hart wins; tails, Hart’s critics lose” is standard shtick with the Hart fan base.

S. Hart’s remaining point vis-à-vis the pantheism issue is one I confess to being unable to make heads or tails of.  It seems to amount to this: “Because Feser himself routinely defends the form/matter and essence/existence distinctions, he cannot consistently complain when Hart deploys these notions in what Feser takes to be a pantheist manner.”  But this is such an obvious non sequitur that I fear I must be missing something.  Any reader who can come up with a more plausible interpretation will win a no-prize.

Well, that’s it.  I’m sorry if I’ve been a little hard on Hart the younger, despite his asking for it.  But I’m sure he won’t mind, delighting as he does in “playful” invective and all!

Touring the fifth circle

For readers who are wondering, yes, I’m on Twitter now.  (I’m not referring to the fan account that has been there for some time, but to my own personal account: @FeserEdward)  I confess to feeling somewhat unclean, since I have not changed my very low opinion of the medium.  The reason for signing up is simply to be able to see what is going on, and I don’t intend to be very active on it myself.  If I ever am, I ask my family and friends to stage an intervention.

Hart’s post-Christian pantheism

Well, kids, it’s that time again.  David Bentley Hart’s new book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature is now out.  So is my review, “David Bentley Hart’s Post-Christian Pantheism,” which you can read at Public Discourse.  As you will see, the title of my essay is not invective, but pretty much just a straightforward description of what’s in the book.

Unjust war and false masculinity

I commend to you three excellent articles by traditionalist Catholic scholars on the grave injustice of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: historian Roberto de Mattei’s “Russia's War and the Message of Fatima”; philosopher John Lamont’s “Putin’s Attack on Ukraine”; and theologian Pater Edmund Waldstein’s “The War in Ukraine in the Light of Just War Principles.”  There is a reason why I emphasize that the injustice is grave, as I have in my earlier commentary on the war.  Few among those who have expressed sympathy with the Russian side in the conflict have claimed that the invasion meets just war criteria (unsurprisingly, since it manifestly does not).  They have tended instead to emphasize Putin’s purported virtues and the vices of Zelensky and his Western supporters – as if these somehow balance out the destruction of cities and the deaths of thousands of human beings. 

This is madness.  Failure to meet just war criteria is not a mere technical foible or procedural lapse.  An unjust war is among the very greatest of evils.  It is mass murder.  Yet some people who rightly decry the slaughter of the unborn, fret over potential health hazards of mandatory Covid-19 vaccination, and condemn the economic destruction of lockdowns can barely muster a disapproving shake of the head for the dead, the wounded, and the dispossessed of Ukraine.  Again, this is madness.  What accounts for it?

We find clues in the articles linked to – specifically, in what Lamont has to say about Putin’s false masculinity, in de Mattei’s critique of the oikophobia of Putin’s Western apologists, and in Waldstein’s remarks about the role of the passions in people’s reaction to the war.  These factors are united in the delusion that Putin’s actions somehow reflect manful resistance to Western decadence and apostasy. 

To be sure, there is no question that the West is indeed decadent and largely apostate.  There is no question that liberalism is foolish and feckless at best, and that wokeness is positively wicked and insane.  It is nauseating to watch Western politicians, CEOs, and educators routinely grovel before wokeness’s “smelly little orthodoxies” (to borrow Orwell’s phrase), rather than doing everything in their power forever to expunge them from our institutions, root and branch.  It is understandable that decent people would be tempted to admire a leader who instead treats woke dogma with the contempt it deserves. 

But the temptation must be resisted, and to think that a few traditional-sounding words and gestures make Putin’s invasion of Ukraine one iota less evil is about as stark an example of a non sequitur as can be imagined.  Nor is it actually true that he represents a salutary masculine counterpoint to Western effeminacy.  Noting the brutality with which Putin targets civilians in war, and the violence and manipulation by which he maintains himself in power, Lamont writes:

This feature of Putin’s rule should be kept in mind by Catholics and conservatives who see him as in some way a defender of traditional or Christian values.  Putin’s opposition to gender and LGBT etc. ideology is no doubt genuine.  It is of course not a mark of Christian commitment, since Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung also either opposed these things or would have opposed them if they had known about them.  The nature and significance of Putin’s opposition to this ideology needs to be understood.  It is the opposition of one evil to the evil at the opposite extreme from it.  Gender ideology denies manhood entirely.  Putin’s actions and ideology spring from an unregenerate masculinity that is twisted into an evil form, that takes the masculine characteristics of aggression and assertion and perverts them into an extreme of brutality and merciless cruelty.

End quote.  If the admiration some Catholics and conservatives have for Putin is rash, so too is their apparent forsaking of their own civilization.  De Mattei notes how, even when the Western Roman Empire was steeped in decadence, Christians dutifully rallied to its defense against more virile barbarian invaders.  They did not let the sins of their homeland blind them to the reality that it was their homeland.

By contrast, some contemporary traditionalists, rather than fighting for the West against all enemies, foreign and domestic, seem more inclined to abandon her to the domestic enemies and root against her in her rivalry with the foreign ones.  But genuine masculinity would eschew such defeatism and oikophobia, in favor of filial loyalty and fighting spirit.  De Mattei writes:

The West is the firstborn son of the Church, today increasingly disfigured by Revolution, but still the firstborn.  A European who disowns it on the pretext of fighting the New World Order is like a son who disowns his mother…

In the fifth century the Goths, the Vandals, and the Huns invaded the Roman Empire to divide its spoils.  Today Russia, China, Turkey, and the Arab world want to seize the rich heritage of the West, which they consider, as has been said, “terminally ill.”

Someone may say: where are you, Stilicho who resisted to the Goths; where are you, Boniface who defended Africa from the Vandals; where are you, Aetius who defeated the Huns?  Where are you, Christian warriors who took up arms to defend a world that was dying?

End quote.  Now, apart from the situation in Ukraine, the battles most contemporary Christians and traditionalists face are not the violent ones our forebears confronted.  They are cultural and political in nature.  Yet, as woke insanity spreads throughout government, corporations, the military, and universities, as police are defunded and workers harassed with pointless mandates, the response of some of the people most impressed by Putin’s purported manliness seems to be a “Benedict Option” style retreat: “Flee the blue states!  Shun the military and the police force!  Run from academia!  Quit the corporations!  Don’t even bother to vote, the system is rigged!  These institutions are all rotten; abandon them to the wokesters!”

Put aside for the moment the irony that a mass exodus of traditionally-minded people from these institutions is exactly what the wokesters want.  Put aside the glaringly obvious strategic problem that the more territory you abandon, the smaller and more vulnerable is any area to which you might retreat.  The salient question for present purposes is: How is this defeatism manly? 

I don’t deny that the circumstances of some particular individuals and families may require relocating, seeking new employment, or what have you.  But abandoning institutions to the woke should be the exception rather than the rule.  The rule should be fighting tooth and nail for every square inch of cultural and political territory.  If an institution is lost, it should never be because it was surrendered.  Premature capitulation is not masculine.  And, to echo de Mattei, a true son of the West will not despair of her and her institutions or flee from them in fear, but redouble his efforts to reclaim them.

That brings us to some remarks from Fr. Waldstein’s essay:

The passions were given us by our Creator to assist us in acting, to help us respond rightly to the goods and evils that we encounter in this life.  The passions are like powerful horses pulling the chariot of the soul toward action.  But of course, passion is not a sufficient guide to human action.  In order to be good guides to action, passion must be informed and guided by reason.  The virtuous man “is not passion’s slave.”  This does not mean that he lacks passions, but rather that he feels them in the right way, and toward the right objects, so as to preserve the true good apprehended by reason.  Reason is like the charioteer who controls the horses of the passions with reigns and whip, so that they draw the chariot in the right direction, and at the right speed, so that it does not capsize at a corner.

There is a danger in human life of being swept along by passion beyond the measure of reason.  This is danger is certainly strong in war time.

End quote.  Now, there are certainly some on the anti-Putin side who have let passion cloud their reason – most especially, those eager for NATO to enter the war, which, as Fr. Waldstein argues (and as I have argued too), would violate just war criteria no less surely than Putin’s invasion does.  And some of this fanaticism is clearly motivated by grievances having nothing to do with Ukraine, such as rage at Putin’s anti-LGBT policies and the delusion that the Russians somehow tipped the 2016 U.S. presidential election against Clinton.

But the faults of some of Putin’s critics simply don’t make his invasion of Ukraine any less evil.  And those who pretend otherwise have also let passion cloud their reason.  If downplaying the gravity of Putin’s crime as a way to “own the libs” has appeal for some, that appeal can only be emotional rather than rational.  Needless to say, that too hardly fits any stereotype of masculinity. 

At the end of the day, even genuine masculine fortitude and sobriety can only ever be an instrumental cause.  From a Catholic point of view, the true solution to the crisis of our age must come from above – from (to give de Mattei the last word) “the triumph of [Our Lady’s] Immaculate Heart over the rubble of the Putin regime, the Chinese communist regime, the Islamic regimes, and those of the corrupt West.  Only she can do it; of us she asks an unshakable trust that this will happen, because She has infallibly promised it.  This is why our resistance continues.”

Conspiracy theories, spontaneous order, and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Nobody denies that conspiracies occur.  They happen every time two or more people collude in order to secure some malign end.  When people criticize “conspiracy theories,” it is a particular kind of conspiracy that they find implausible.  I’ve written several times before about some of the marks of conspiracy theories of this dubious kind.  They tend to be grounded in “narrative thinking” rather than a rigorous and dispassionate consideration of the merits and deficiencies of all alternative possible explanations.  They tend to violate Ockham’s razor, posit conspiracies that are too vast and complicated to be psychologically and sociologically feasible, and reflect naiveté about the way modern bureaucracies function.  The vastness of the posited conspiracy often has implications for the reliability of news media and other sources of information that make the theory epistemically self-defeating and unfalsifiable.  (For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I’ll use the expression “conspiracy theories” to refer, specifically, to theories having vices like these – acknowledging, again, that there are conspiracies of a more plausible kind, and thus conspiracy theories of a more plausible kind.)

A superficially similar but at bottom very different sort of theory is represented by examples of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”  Theories of this kind posit forces which might seem analogous to the malign actors imagined by conspiracy theorists, but which ultimately operate in an impersonal manner.  Hence Marxism analyzes prevailing moral and cultural institutions as ideologies functioning to uphold dominant economic interests, Foucault regards them as expressions of power, Critical Race Theory as expressions of “white supremacy,” and so on.

Such theories share some of the flaws of conspiracy theories.  Like conspiracy theories, they rely on “narrative thinking” rather than rigorous argumentation, oversimplify complex social phenomena, and read sinister meaning into what is innocuous.  They also tend to dismiss criticism and counterarguments as merely the expression of the purported sinister forces, rather than evaluating them logically and dispassionately.  (“That’s just what the interests of [power, capital, white supremacy, etc.] want you to think!”)  Like conspiracy theories, they thereby open themselves up to the charge of being self-defeating.  If everything is “nothing but” the expression of some economic interest and can be dismissed as having no objective validity, why can’t we say the same of Marxism?  If it is merely the expression of the interests of power, what power interests does Foucault’s analysis itself serve?  If it is the expression of racism, how can Critical Race Theory itself be exempt?

All the same, instances of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” are not conspiracy theories, because they don’t attribute the phenomena they analyze to any sort of plotting or design.  The claim is not that a cabal of capitalists, racists, or other powerful interests got together in a smoke-filled room to map out how cultural and social institutions would be set up.  Rather, the malign forces such a theory posits are treated as impersonal abstractions that (somehow) nevertheless operate as if they were concrete, personal entities.  Accordingly, such theories tend to commit a fallacy of hypostatization or reification.  Where conspiracy theories attribute too much to human agency, the hermeneutics of suspicion attributes too little to it.  Abstractions like “capital,” “power,” “white supremacy,” etc. don’t exist over and above specific individuals and institutions who could intelligibly be said, whether correctly or incorrectly, to exercise power, to have economic interests, to harbor racist attitudes, or whatever.  Hence, to the extent that an analysis cannot be cashed out in terms of the motives and activities of such specific individuals and institutions, it fails to capture anything real.

Now, there is a third kind of theory which claims to explain the same sorts of phenomena as conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion, but does not have the problems that those approaches exhibit.  Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a commonly accepted label for this approach.  Borrowing from F. A. Hayek, I’ll label them theories of “spontaneous order,” though I’m not entirely happy with the phrase.  In addition to Hayek, the best-known representatives of this sort of approach are the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.  Smith’s “invisible hand” principle is one application, as is Hayek’s elaboration of how prices generated in the free market encapsulate scattered bits of information that would otherwise be inaccessible to economic actors.  In an earlier post, I suggested that Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media, when abstracted from the specific political assumptions they bring to bear on it, counts as another application.

What analyses of this kind describe are, as Ferguson famously put it, “the results of human action but not of human design.”  Smith argues that when economic agents act in their own best interests, society in general reaps unforeseen benefits insofar as production, innovation, services, etc. are efficiently fitted to actual demand.  Hayek argues that when consumers are guided by market prices, economic information is communicated and used as effectively as possible.  Herman and Chomsky argue that the incentives built into a corporately-owned media system tend naturally to filter out information and opinions awareness of which would be contrary to the common interests of corporations and governments. 

Now, you may or may not agree with one or more of these theories of “spontaneous order.”  That’s fine.  I’m neither defending nor criticizing any of them here, but just using them as examples of a general style of analysis.  Note, however, that you don’t need to agree with the use these theorists make of these theories in order to find the theories themselves of interest.  Smith and Hayek are favorable to the market economy, and Herman and Chomsky are unfavorable to corporate media.  But that is irrelevant to the cogency (or lack thereof) of their analyses.  Someone could agree that the effects described by Smith and Hayek are real and still be unfavorable toward the free market, and someone could agree that the effects described by Herman and Chomsky are real and still favor corporate media.  It all depends on what other premises and values are factored into one’s overall political or economic view of things.

Anyway, the thing to emphasize for present purposes is that theories of “spontaneous order” are neither conspiracy theories nor instances of the hermeneutics of suspicion.  The effects described by Smith, Hayek, and Herman and Chomsky are brought about by specific human beings and specific institutions acting in clearly identifiable ways according to explicit motives.  There is no reference to reified abstractions acting in ways that only personal or other concrete entities can.  (The “invisible hand” is no exception, because Smith’s whole point is that there is no such hand.  It’s only as if there were.)  At the same time, these specific agents and institutions are not acting with the intention or design of bringing about the specific effects that Smith, Hayek, and Edward and Chomsky describe.  There is no conspiracy.  Consumers are not consciously trying to increase the efficiency with which economic information is transmitted, reporters are not consciously trying to uphold the interests of corporations, and so on.  Again, the whole point of theories of this kind is to explain how complex social patterns can be “the results of human action” and at the same time “not of human design.”

We might think of the systems posited by “spontaneous order” theorists on the model of what philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright calls “nomological machines.”  A nomological machine is a system of substances whose causal powers, when acting in tandem, generate patterns which approximate laws of nature.  For example, the solar system is a nomological machine.  What it is fundamentally made up of are objects like our sun, the various planets and asteroids, etc., all with their distinctive properties and powers.  Given that such objects are in the right sort of proximity to one another and mutually trigger the operation of their causal powers, the result is a system that more or less operates in the way described by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.  Cartwright’s point is that laws of nature are not fundamental to physical reality.  Rather, what are fundamental to physical reality are various concrete physical substances, and their distinctive properties and causal powers.  When these substances get into the right configuration, the result is a pattern that approximates a law.  Laws are, accordingly, idealized descriptions of phenomena that are themselves derivative from something more fundamental.  Treating laws as themselves the fundamental facts about physical reality just gets the natural world badly wrong.  (See chapter 3 of my book Aristotle’s Revenge for detailed exposition and defense of this sort of view.)

The processes posited by theories of “spontaneous order” are like this.  Given a collection of individual economic actors responding to market forces, the result (the theory says) will be the patterns described by Smith and Hayek.  It’s as if these economic actors are following economic laws, but really they are not.  Any purported economic laws are really only approximations at best of complex patterns that arise when economic actors interact in certain ways under certain conditions.  Something similar can be said of the behavior of media personnel, government officials, etc. in the context described by Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model.  It’s as if they are following some law of corporate media behavior, though really they are not.

Because human beings and social phenomena are vastlymore complex than (say) the solar system, the “laws” in these cases are only very remote approximations and idealizations, rather than closely conforming to what actually happens (since human beings, after all, are moved by far more than merely economic considerations, political incentives, etc.).  There are and can be no strict “laws” where human beings and social phenomena are concerned.  But the “spontaneous order” models are still useful, because they do capture real systemic features and tendencies, even if meretendencies (rather than exceptionless patterns) is all they are. 

I would suggest that Cartwright’s account provides one way of seeing what is wrong with conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion.  Cartwright’s neo-Aristotelian view of laws is what you might call a “bottom-up” view.  Again, what are fundamental to nature are concrete substances and their powers, and laws are derivative abstractions, and typically approximations at best.  (This is true, as Cartwright famously argues, even of laws of physics.)  The view she opposes takes a “top-down” view of laws, according to which laws are the fundamental physical reality and imposed from above on the rest of nature – whether by a divine designer, or as just a brute fact about the world.

Conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion are, I submit, comparable to “top-down” views about laws of nature, and are especially comparable to attempts to identify strict “laws” governing economic or other social phenomena.  They both try to wedge what is really a very messy, complex social reality into a simplistic model that abstracts from how human beings and human institutions actually operate.  Conspiracy theories do so by identifying a “designer” of the patterns they claim to explain, whereas the hermeneutics of suspicion takes those patterns to be something like a brute fact about the social world rather than the product of design.  (I don’t claim that my analogy here is terribly exact, only that it is suggestive.)

The Substack writer Eugyppius has written some helpful articles (e.g. here and here) about why the manner in which governments have handled the Covid-19 situation is best understood in “spontaneous order” terms rather than in terms of conspiracy.  In particular, the stubbornly incompetent and callous nature of pandemic policy reflects the incentives, values, and information flow that prevail in modern bureaucracies, rather than centralized planning.  As Eugyppius emphasizes, this by no means entails that those responsible for making policy don’t often have bad motives.  That’s not the point.  The point is that in order effectively to counter destructive policies and corrupt and incompetent authorities, we need to understand how social institutions, including governments, actually work.  Conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion darken our understanding – and thereby inadvertently give aid and comfort to bad policymakers whom we can effectively resist only with sobriety.

Related posts:

Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media

Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

The Bizarro world of left-wing politics

The trouble with conspiracy theories

Brin on conspiracy theories

Epstein on conspiracies

We the sheeple? Why conspiracy theories persist

Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media

A common mistake people make when evaluating a theory is to fail to keep in mind the distinction between the theory itself, its application to particular cases, and the auxiliary assumptions an advocate of the theory makes when developing that application.  People will often reject a theory because they find some particular application problematic, where if they thought about the matter more carefully they would see that the problem is only with that application and/or with the auxiliary assumptions, and not with the theory itself. 

For example, and as I’ve often emphasized, philosophers and historians of science commit this error when they claim that the key theses of Aristotelian philosophy of nature (concerning substantial form, natural teleology, etc.) were refuted by modern science.  As I have argued, what modern science has refuted are really only certain auxiliary empirical assumptions that medieval Aristotelians took for granted when applying these ideas, but not the ideas themselves.

Naturally, it would also be fallacious to judge that some application of a theory, or some auxiliary assumption made when developing that application, must be correct simply because the theory itself is sound.  A modern Aristotelian would be committing such a fallacy if, for example, he judged that, since Aristotelian philosophy of nature is after all still defensible, we should conclude that medieval empirical science too is still defensible and that Galileo and company were all wrong. 

A very different example is provided by the “propaganda model” of mass media famously associated with Noam Chomsky, and developed by Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent.  Chomsky is well-known for applying this model to media coverage of U.S. foreign policy, in the service of his particular (anarchosyndicalist) brand of left-wing politics and economics.  Many right-wingers dismiss Chomsky’s model because they reject his left-wing assumptions and the claims he makes about U.S. foreign policy in the name of the model.  Many left-wingers, finding the model itself plausible and already sympathetic to some the political and economic assumptions Chomsky brings to bear when applying it, judge that the applications must be sound.  But here too the three factors – the model itself, the auxiliary political and economic assumptions in question, and the various applications to particular cases – must be distinguished.  Acceptance (or rejection) of one doesn’t entail acceptance (or rejection) of the others.

Wholesale acceptance or rejection is nevertheless common, and tends to be vehement, for Chomsky is a polarizing figure.  This is unsurprising.  On the one hand, he is obviously brilliant and has made important contributions to modern intellectual life – to linguistics, of course, but also to philosophy, as I have noted here before.  Even when you think what he is saying is batty, he is always interesting to listen to, and is independently-minded enough to annoy even his fans from time to time.  On the other hand, especially on political matters he is, to say the least, prone to wild overstatement and sweeping remarks.  He has an annoying habit of reeling out long strings of peremptory assertions, some of them reasonable, some unreasonable, but in any case largely tendentious and controversial yet presented as if no rational and well-informed person could possibly disagree.  He is himself also insufficiently careful to distinguish his “propaganda model” from the left-wing political and economic assumptions that influence his application of it.

My own political and economic views are most certainly not left-wing, though I also reject the libertarian or doctrinaire free-market position that is Chomsky’s usual target.  In my opinion, capitalism is a mixed bag.  You needn’t either accept the whole thing or reject the whole thing.  Left-wingers are too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and right-wingers are too willing to swallow the bathwater in the name of saving the baby.  In any event, my fundamental political principles are subsidiarity, solidarity, and pietas rather than, say, liberty, equality, and fraternity (much less diversity, equity, and inclusion).  My basic economic principles are those of popes Leo XIII and Pius XI.  In short, I approach these issues from the point of view of Catholic social teaching and Thomistic natural law theory.

Naturally, since my political and economic commitments are very different from Chomsky’s, I disagree with much of what he says when he applies his “propaganda model” to specific cases.  For example, while I agree with him that business interests are not always as benign as too many free-marketers suppose, I do not think that U.S. anti-communist foreign policy was essentially malign, as Chomsky supposes.  But you’d have to go case by case when evaluating his various applications of the model, and that’s not what I’m interested in here.  What I do want to address is the “propaganda model” itself, which can be disentangled from Chomsky’s own applications and his background auxiliary political and economic assumptions.

The model

Chomsky and Herman’s “propaganda model” is intended to explain and predict how mass media operate in capitalist countries like the United States, where the feature of capitalism they are most concerned with is the domination of the economic system by large private business corporations.  They hold that mass media in such countries exhibit a systematic tendency to select and convey information, formulate matters of controversy, and frame what counts as respectable alternative positions on those matters, in a way that reflects and upholds the basic ideological presuppositions of the overall corporate order of things.  This basic idea is pretty simple, and may even seem almost trivially true.  Indeed, Chomsky himself takes the basic thesis to be really more of an observation about a fairly obvious feature of the system rather than a “theory.”  But it is an observation that many people do not make, and its implications are insufficiently appreciated.

Chomsky and Herman hold that there are, specifically, five “filters” that determine what information and ideas tend to be conveyed through mass media and how they are presented.  The first concerns the ownership of the media.  In the United States, the main media outlets are themselves owned by large private corporations.  Accordingly, they have a direct interest in upholding the ideological presuppositions of the overall corporate-dominated economic order.  There are, of course, smaller and more local media companies as well.  But they have a strong tendency to reflect the view of things that prevails in the larger mass media.  For the larger companies have much greater resources and thus can generate the information and opinion content that smaller companies draw on in putting together their own content.  The larger companies also have brand-name recognition and prestige that gives smaller and more local media an incentive to follow their lead.

The second filter concerns advertising as the primary source of the income of media companies.  This feature makes media companies inclined to cater primarily to the interests of advertisers rather than to those of readers or viewers (who provide much less in the way of revenue via subscriptions and the like).  Advertisers themselves are primarily interested in appealing to those with purchasing power.  The overall result is that media companies have a strong incentive not to offend the sensibilities of the wealthy, and indeed to frame news and opinion in a way that upholds the basic presuppositions of the system that keeps them wealthy.

The third filter concerns the sources of the information and opinions that are propagated by mass media, which are primarily government officials, business interests, and the experts who are approved of and often funded by government and business.  News media require government and business sources to provide most of the day-to-day information that serves as the content of news stories and programs.  That reporters can draw on “official” sources like these saves them much work and gives the information a prima facie credibility, especially since the government and business sources have more direct knowledge of the events and policies being reported on.  Media also have a natural incentive to want to stay on good terms with these sources.  Government and business sources, meanwhile, obviously have a strong incentive to present information in a way that is maximally consistent with furthering their own interests, and also to stay on good terms with media.  The result is that media, government, and business tend to converge in the picture of events that they present to the public, in a kind of tacit collusion of bureaucracies.

Universities are also a source of expert information, but these, Chomsky notes, are themselves largely dependent for their funding on government and on corporate donations.  Hence they inherit the tendency not to challenge the basic ideological presuppositions shared by government and corporations.  We might note also that, just as smaller media companies follow the lead of the big corporations, so too do smaller academic institutions tend to follow the lead of the most prestigious universities vis-à-vis what ideas are judged respectable, who are the sorts of faculty who ought therefore to be hired, and so on.  And the most prestigious universities are, of course, the ones that cater to the wealthiest segment of society, and whose graduates provide the personnel that dominate media, business, and government.  The result of all this is that it is what is in the common interest of these institutions (government, big corporations, mass media companies, and prestige universities) that will be reflected in the sources that shape the content of news and opinion outlets.

The fourth filter has to do with the “flak” or negative feedback that mass media companies get when their content conflicts with these common interests.  Flak can of course include angry letters to the editor from unhappy readers and the like, but this is not the sort of thing that makes much of a difference to media content.  The flak that counts is the flak that comes from powerful people and institutions – corporations who might threaten lawsuits or pull their advertising from a program or publication, government officials who might stop providing information or threaten hostile regulation, experts whose criticism of a media outlet might entail a loss of prestige, boycotts organized by well-funded interest groups, and so on.

The fifth and final filter is “fear.”  The idea here is that mass media have an interest in selecting and conveying information, and in molding what counts as a respectable range of opinion, in a manner that is conducive to generating fear and hostility toward anyone who would challenge the shared basic ideological presuppositions of the overall government-corporate-media complex.  News stories will, accordingly, tend to characterize people who criticize these presuppositions as ill-informed and irrational, will portray these critics as a constant threat to social order, will play up stories that make this threat seem grave and imminent, and so on. 

Naturally, these critics will also tend to be portrayed as villainous in the popular entertainment content provided by mass media companies.  But Chomsky sees such entertainment as playing essentially a “bread and circuses” role in the corporate economic order.  The function of the ideas that prevail in news media, expert opinion, and universities is to mold the thinking of those who will become future leaders in government, business, media, etc., so that they will act in a way that positively upholds the ideological presuppositions of the status quo.  The function of the ideas conveyed in popular entertainment is to keep the masses acquiescent in this status quo, but primarily by way of providing endless distractions that keep most people from even thinking about the nature of the political and economic system and its ideological presuppositions.

Common misunderstandings

In order properly to understand this “propaganda model” of mass media, it is crucial to note that it is not saying what people often mistakenly accuse it of saying.  For example, Chomsky is often accused of peddling a “conspiracy theory.”  But that is precisely what he is not doing.  Indeed, Chomsky has, much to the frustration of some of his fans, been consistently critical of the best-known conspiracy theories of recent times, such as those that posit U.S. government involvement in the JFK assassination, those that claim that 9/11 was an “inside job,” and those that allege “collusion” between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election.

Chomsky is not positing a cabal of sinister operatives who gather in smoke-filled rooms to plot out what will be said in mass media.  He is instead describing economic incentives, cultural attitudes and mores, and the like, which shape the thinking of opinion-makers mostly without their even realizing it.  He is also not claiming that most of the people who write news stories and express opinions on issues of the day are lying, or that they have bad motives.  On the contrary, he says that for the most part they sincerely believe themselves to be conveying the unvarnished facts and to be providing reasonable and responsible commentary about those facts.  The trouble is rather that, in determining what facts are important and worth reporting, which experts to trust, which alternative opinions are respectable and worth a hearing, and so forth, they are guided by assumptions they are mostly unaware of and never seriously question, and that these assumptions conform to the basic ideological presuppositions of the overall governmental-corporate order of things.  Hence they never seriously reflect on whether that order is itself problematic, and indeed find it very difficult even to consider the possibility that it might be and that those who challenge it might have serious reasons for doing so.

Nor is Chomsky positing a self-defeating “hermeneutics of suspicion” that undermines the possibility of knowing anything, including the propaganda model itself.  Chomsky is not a skeptic who thinks that we can never get at the truth.  On the contrary, he thinks that the relevant information about important controversies is available, sometimes in media and government sources themselves.  The trouble is that most people, including journalists and opinion makers, either don’t bother to look for it or misunderstand its significance.  The reason is, again, that their decisions about what is worth looking for, about how to interpret the relevant information, etc. are shaped by assumptions that uphold the interests of the corporate-government-media order and which they never seriously question. 

Chomsky also acknowledges that there are dissident voices and alternative sources of information.  He does not think that the U.S. political system is like that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, violently quashing dissent.  He emphasizes that that is not how suppression of criticism of those in power works in capitalist societies with democratic political structures.  Rather, it works in the much more subtle ways described by the propaganda model.  Indeed, the point of the model is in part to explain how violent suppression is not the only way for powerful political and economic forces to sustain themselves.  Chomsky is not claiming that dissent cannot or does not exist in the political and economic order he criticizes, but rather that voices and institutions that challenge the basic presuppositions of that order are at a massive disadvantage.  Hence it is not a serious criticism of the propaganda model to point out that there do exist anti-establishment media, that critics like Chomsky are able to get their books and articles published, etc.

Chomsky also does not deny the obvious fact that there is media criticism of government policy and of business, vigorous debate between the political parties over policy, and so on.  His point is that the criticism and debate are all kept within certain boundaries.  Criticism occurs when government or business does not live up to principles that reflect the basic ideological presuppositions of the state-corporate-media order of things.  Policies are considered worthy of debate when they are consistent with those presuppositions.  What does not occur is criticism or debate about those basic presuppositions themselves.  Chomsky also acknowledges that corporations do not always pursue profit, for an idea might be profitable in the short term but have a tendency to undermine the basic presuppositions of the government-corporate-media order in the long run.  Hence corporations and media will forego profits in a particular case if doing so helps to uphold that order.

It is also very important to see that there is nothing essentially left-wing in the model as I have described it so far.  Indeed, the model as I have described it so far is for the most part politically neutral.  One can even imagine someone who approves of the existing political and economic order of things and judges it good and proper that it is upheld in the way that Chomsky describes.  But of course, for someone who is critical of that order, what the propaganda model describes is seriously problematic, a major structural impediment to achieving a more just society.

Chomsky, again, criticizes the prevailing political and economic order from a left-wing point of view – in particular, from a veryfar-left point of view that he describes as “libertarian socialist” or anarchosyndicalist.  Hence the examples he uses to illustrate the “propaganda model” reflect that point of view.  For instance, his examples of the “fear” filter include anti-communism and the war on terror, and he routinely characterizes the government-corporate-media complex that the propaganda model upholds as “right-wing.” 

Conservative critics of Chomsky often find this mystifying.  They point to the liberal bias of news outlets like CNN and The New York Times, and the fact that one of the two main U.S. political parties is liberal, as if such facts obviously refuted him.  But what Chomsky is criticizing is what mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike agree on.  Both parties uphold a capitalist economic order dominated by large corporations, and thus neither is socialist, despite the fact that Democrats tend to favor more regulation and redistributive taxation than Republicans do.  From Chomsky’s perspective, that makes them both “right-wing” (even if the Republicans are further right than the Democrats) and thus he is critical of liberals and conservatives alike.  From a right-wing point of view that may be an idiosyncratic use of the term “right-wing,” but the substantive point is that to refute Chomsky it does not suffice merely to point out that mainstream media outlets tend to be liberal.

Appropriating the model

One could, in any case, object to the U.S. government-corporate-media complex from a right-wing perspective that is not as uncritical of capitalism as Chomsky’s usual conservative targets tend to be.  For example, one could object to it from a populist point of view, or from the point of view of Catholic integralism or some other brand of throne-and-altar conservatism.  Or one could simply object to features of the system for reasons drawn from Catholic social teaching and Thomistic natural law theory, even if one does not go in for populism, integralism, etc.  And one could adopt something like Chomsky’s “propaganda model” as a tool for analysis and criticism.  Needless to say, the particular features of contemporary mass media and state and corporate behavior that a right-wing version of the “propaganda model” would object to would be very different from the things Chomsky emphasizes.  But the basic model would be similar.  It would simply be a matter of applying it to different cases than the ones that interest Chomsky, and bringing different auxiliary political and economic assumptions to bear on the application.

Nor is it difficult to see obvious applications in recent history.  Consider the lockdowns that afforded no significant net benefit in dealing with Covid-19, but inflicted staggering economic damage and harm to children’s education and mental health.  Consider the 2020 riots that destroyed many businesses and neighborhoods, and the spike in crime that predictably followed in the wake of the imbecilic “defund the police” movement.  Consider the stubborn insistence on Covid-19 vaccine mandates even after it became clear that vaccination was no longer effective in stopping transmission, despite the fact that many who refused to comply have lost their jobs as a result.  Mass media outlets were in general not only supportive of these manifestly destructive policies, but shamelessly censored critics of the policies and demonized them as “anti-science,” “anti-vax,” “racist,” etc.

Given all of this enormous damage and how predictable it was, what explains the government-corporate-media complex’s support for the policies that led to it?  Well, consider some further facts.  Large corporations did extremely well during the lockdowns, especially media corporations and the tech companies that provide them their platforms.  It is the small businesses that compete with big corporations that suffered.  Wealthy and educated people who largely work and live online anyway had a relatively easy economic and psychological transition to lockdown conditions.  Working-class people, by contrast, either lost their jobs, or had to put themselves at risk of getting the virus in order to make it possible for the affluent to work from home while still getting their food and groceries delivered, their plumbing and electrical problems solved, and so on.  Wealthy people also had the financial wherewithal and technological resources to stay at home and make sure their children learned online, whereas poorer people had to go out to work or lacked the resources to provide reliable online access to class materials and Zoom sessions.  It was primarily poor neighborhoods that suffered when rioting occurred and when police presence was reduced.  Mandatory vaccination made enormous profits for pharmaceutical companies, and entailed unprecedented control by government-corporate-media bureaucracies over citizens, consumers, and public opinion.  Those who lost their jobs for resisting were largely working class people, as were the bulk of those demonized as “racist,” “anti-vax,” etc. 

In short, the social chaos of the last two years yielded increased wealth for corporations, increased power for governments, increased control over information flow for the mass media, and increased financial rewards and cost-free virtue-signaling opportunities for the affluent – while at the same time imposing economic hardship, decreased public safety, educational setbacks, psychological stress and humiliation on the working class and the poor. 

It is largely right-of-center voices who have been calling attention to this breathtaking social injustice, though there are many honorable exceptions on the left – some, like Glenn Greenwald, precisely in a Chomskian spirit.  In any event, the “propaganda model” makes good sense of what happened.  And again, it has nothing to do with any conspiracy.  It is instead a matter of a class of people with certain common interests and ideological presuppositions naturally converging on policies that serve those interests and support those presuppositions, while being blind or indifferent to the costs imposed on people with different interests or presuppositions. 

Unfortunately, too many right-wingers have over the last couple of years nevertheless fallen for crackpot “narratives” and woolly conspiracy theories.  The patterns they see in recent events are real, and they are correct to judge that these patterns are not accidental, but they reason fallaciously when they infer from this that there must therefore be some cabal that planned things to go the way they have.  The fallacy is similar to the one committed by egalitarians when they judge that economic disparities must have come about by discrimination. 

The truth is that complex social phenomena have structural features that can generate patterns without anyone having intended them.  They are, as Hayek liked to say, “spontaneous orders” which (as Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson famously put it) are “the products of human action but not of human design.”  Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is one such mechanism, and Chomsky’s “propaganda model” describes another.  That does not mean, either with the patterns Smith described or those that the “propaganda model” describes, that the patterns are necessarily benign or that we can’t work to counteract them.  That’s not the point.  The point is that before you can properly evaluate such a pattern, you need to understand how it actually comes about.  Conspiracy theories don’t aid us in understanding this, but only obscure what is really going on.  Into the bargain, they actually helpthose who are responsible for bad policies, by making their critics look paranoid and stupid.  (The Substack writer Eugyppius has written some helpful articles – e.g. hereand here– about why what has been happening over the past couple of years is best understood as malign instances of “spontaneous order,” rather than in terms of conspiracy.)

The foolish things being said by a few (by no means all) Catholic traditionalists in defense of Vladimir Putin are the latest fruit of this muddleheaded “narrative thinking” and conspiracy theorizing.  The narrative has it that the people who favored lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and who are imposing “wokeness” on the country, have also long hated Putin because of his hostility to wokeness and because of their lunatic belief that he somehow stole the 2016 election for Trump.  And that much is true enough.  The problem is that the Putin defenders think this somehow shows that the invasion of Ukraine is defensible, or at least maybe not so bad, and that to oppose it somehow puts one in league with the woke conspiracy.  If you’re having trouble following the logic here, that’s because there isn’t any.  Whatever one thinks of Putin’s anti-woke and pro-Christian rhetoric, the fact remains that his invasion of Ukraine manifestly doesn’t meet just war criteria, and an unjust war is among the most grave of injustices.  Hence Putin is perpetrating great evil, and the fact that he has said some nice things in favor of Christianity and against wokeness doesn’t change that for a moment.

Of course, it doesn’t follow that NATO intervention in the war is a good idea.  Since it would risk nuclear war, it is an extremely bad idea, and itself would not meet just war criteria.  That there is even a debate about this is, I think, a consequence of the anti-Russian hysteria that has been ginned up within the mass media over the last few years.  That brings us back to Chomsky, who has long been critical of this hysteria and who I’ll give the last word.  In a recent interview, he addresses the Ukrainian situation.  On the one hand, he notes that peaceful, diplomatic means of addressing Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion were available before the war, and thus condemns Putin’s “criminal invasion” of Ukraine.  On the other hand, he warns against actions that can only make the situation far worse, such as the NATO no-fly zone requested by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.  Says Chomsky:

Zelensky’s plea is understandable.  [But] responding to it would very likely lead to the obliteration of Ukraine and well beyond.  The fact that it is even discussed in the U.S. is astonishing.  The idea is madness.  A no-fly zone means that the U.S. Air Force would not only be attacking Russian planes but would also be bombing Russian ground installations that provide anti-aircraft support for Russian forces, with whatever “collateral damage” ensues.  Is it really difficult to comprehend what follows?

Related reading:

Chomsky on the mind-body problem

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

The trouble with capitalism

Hayek’s tragic capitalism

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

Scientism: America’s state religion

Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories

The trouble with conspiracy theories

Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war