Edward Feser's Blog, page 26
January 15, 2022
Barron on ���diversity, equity, and inclusion���
In a recent Word on Fire video, Bishop Robert Barron comments on the currently fashionable chatter about ���diversity, equity, and inclusion��� (or DEI, as they are commonly abbreviated). In much political and cultural debate and institutional policy, these have come to be treated as fundamental and absolute values. Indeed, as Bishop Barron notes, the trio has come to have the status that liberty, equality, and fraternity had for the French revolutionaries. But like the latter notions, DEI rhetoric is not as innocuous as many suppose. As the bishop argues, diversity, equity, and inclusion can have only relative and derivative rather than absolute and fundamental value, and some forms of them are bad. I���ll summarize Barron���s points and then add some reflections of my own. As he acknowledges, there are obvious respects in which diversity, equity, and inclusion can be good. The diversity or variety that we find in the natural and social orders reflects the richness of being; justice requires equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and the like; and certain forms of exclusion from participation in the political and economic orders are gravely unjust, such as the slavery that existed in the American south before the Civil War. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, Barron says, are valuable insofar as they facilitate the realization of fundamental and absolute values, such as justice and love (where love is defined as willing the good of another).
At the same time, as Bishop Barron points out, there are other respects in which diversity, equity, and inclusion can be bad. A social order can exist only when its members recognize a common good, and principles that transcend the interests of individuals and unite them into a whole. Thus, a degree of diversity that would allow even for the rejection of any such binding principles, or any common good, would destroy the social order.
As Barron also notes, some inequities are a consequence precisely of the diversity of strengths, interests, etc. that naturally exist among human beings. They cannot be eliminated, and to try to eliminate them would entail totalitarianism. Here Bishop Barron is simply reiterating a theme that is longstanding in Catholic social teaching. In Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII taught:
It is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition.
In Humanum Genus, Leo wrote:
No one doubts that all men are equal one to another, so far as regards their common origin and nature, or the last end which each one has to attain, or the rights and duties which are thence derived. But, as the abilities of all are not equal, as one differs from another in the powers of mind or body, and as there are very many dissimilarities of manner, disposition, and character, it is most repugnant to reason to endeavor to confine all within the same measure, and to extend complete equality to the institutions of civic life.
Criticizing the Sillonist religious socialist movement in the encyclical Notre Charge Apostolique, Pope St. Pius X states:
The Sillon says that it is striving to establish an era of equality which, by that very fact, would be also an era of greater justice. Thus, to the Sillon, every inequality of condition is an injustice, or at least, a diminution of justice. Here we have a principle that conflicts sharply with the nature of things, a principle conducive to jealously, injustice, and subversive to any social order.
Similar statements can be found in the teaching of other popes and in the tradition more generally.
Inclusion, argues Barron, cannot be absolute, for the same reason diversity cannot be. Inclusion is always inclusion within some social order. But, again, any such order requires, for its very existence, commitment to common principles and a particular way of life defined by those principles. Any society must therefore exclude those who refuse to abide by those principles. Nor, as Bishop Barron notes, does the Church���s openness to all show otherwise. As he says, the Church welcomes everyone, but only on Christ���s terms, not their own.
Much more can be said. To reinforce Bishop Barron���s point that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not absolute values, we should note that there are obvious respects in which they will not be present in Heaven. For example, there will be no diversity of religious belief in Heaven. The central feature of Heaven is the beatific vision ��� the direct, clear, and distinct knowledge of the very essence of the triune God. Hence, in Heaven, there will be no atheists, no anti-Trinitarians, no pantheists, etc. Such errors will not be possible. (Am I saying that no one who is presently guilty of such errors about the divine nature will be saved, not even by invincible ignorance? No, I am saying that even if they are saved, they will not persist in those errors in Heaven, because the beatific vision precludes that.)
What about equity? The Church teaches that, in the afterlife, not all will be rewarded equally or punished equally. For example, the Council of Florence states that those who are saved ���are straightaway received into heaven and clearly behold the triune God as he is, yet one person more perfectly than another according to the difference of their merits.��� Similarly, the council teaches, the damned ���go down straightaway to hell to be punished, but with unequal pains.��� For not all the righteous are equally righteous, and not all the wicked are equally wicked. In this way, some inequities are destined to persist forever.
St. Therese of Lisieux proposed a famous analogy in her autobiography The Story of a Soul:
I once told you how astonished I was that God does not give equal glory in heaven to all His chosen. I was afraid they were not at all equally happy. You made me bring Daddy���s tumbler and put it by the side of my thimble. You filled them both with water and asked me which was fuller. I told you they were both full to the brim and that it was impossible to put more water in them than they could hold. And so, Mother darling, you made me understand that in heaven God will give His chosen their fitting glory and that the last will have no reason to envy the first.
End quote. But doesn���t God love everyone equally? No, he does not. As Aquinas argues, although there is a sense in which God loves all things equally, insofar as it is the same one act of will by which he loves everything, there is also a sense in which he clearly loves some more than others, which is reflected precisely in the fact that he has not given the same degree of goodness to all:
In this way we are said to love that one more than another, for whom we will a greater good, though our will is not more intense. In this way we must needs say that God loves some things more than others. For since God���s love is the cause of goodness in things, as has been said, no one thing would be better than another, if God did not will greater good for one than for another��� God is said to have equally care of all, not because by His care He deals out equal good to all, but because He administers all things with a like wisdom and goodness���
It must needs be��� that God loves more the better things. For it has been shown, that God's loving one thing more than another is nothing else than His willing for that thing a greater good: because God's will is the cause of goodness in things; and the reason why some things are better than others, is that God wills for them a greater good. Hence it follows that He loves more the better things. (Summa Theologiae I.20.3-4)
Moreover, the love that God has for us, and the love he commands us to have for others, is by no means unqualified, and by no means does it entail an attitude of inclusiveness toward evildoers. Aquinas writes:
Two things may be considered in the sinner: his nature and his guilt. According to his nature, which he has from God, he has a capacity for happiness, on the fellowship of which charity is based, as stated above, wherefore we ought to love sinners, out of charity, in respect of their nature. On the other hand their guilt is opposed to God, and is an obstacle to happiness. Wherefore, in respect of their guilt whereby they are opposed to God, all sinners are to be hated, even one's father or mother or kindred, according to Luke 12:26. For it is our duty to hate, in the sinner, his being a sinner, and to love in him, his being a man capable of bliss; and this is to love him truly, out of charity, for God's sake���
As the Philosopher observes (Ethic. ix, 3), when our friends fall into sin, we ought not to deny them the amenities of friendship, so long as there is hope of their mending their ways, and we ought to help them more readily to regain virtue than to recover money, had they lost it, for as much as virtue is more akin than money to friendship. When, however, they fall into very great wickedness, and become incurable, we ought no longer to show them friendliness. (Summa Theologiae II-II.25.6)
In this last passage, Aquinas echoes Christ���s teaching on reproving the sinner:
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. (Matthew 18:15-17)
Of course, this refusal of inclusiveness is, in this life, not absolute. Even the seemingly most obstinate sinners may end up repenting after all ��� one of the purposes of excommunication is, in fact, to try to help the excommunicated person to see the gravity of his situation ��� and when they do repent they must be shown the friendliness we temporarily denied them. But if they do not repent before death, there will be no inclusiveness shown them in the afterlife, as scripture, the Fathers, popes, creeds, councils, and catechisms clearly and irreformably teach (and as Bishop Barron agrees, by the way). There will then be no DEI office to which they might appeal.
Needless to say, many contemporary Christians cite scriptural passages that speak of forgiveness, mercy, and the like in defense of a radical inclusiveness and universalism, while ignoring the many passages that would exclude such an interpretation. They peddle these selective misreadings as if they represented some new and deeper insight into the Gospel. In fact there is no new insight here at all, but just that ancient error of hairesis or heresy ��� ���choosing��� the part of Christian doctrine you like and ignoring the part you don���t like, inevitably distorting the former in the process. The true sources of radical egalitarianism are to be found, not in the teaching of Christ, but in a disorder of the soul first analyzed by Plato and in apostasy from Christianity.
Related posts:
Liberty, equality, fraternity?
Barron on “diversity, equity, and inclusion”
In a recent Word on Fire video, Bishop Robert Barron comments on the currently fashionable chatter about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (or DEI, as they are commonly abbreviated). In much political and cultural debate and institutional policy, these have come to be treated as fundamental and absolute values. Indeed, as Bishop Barron notes, the trio has come to have the status that liberty, equality, and fraternity had for the French revolutionaries. But like the latter notions, DEI rhetoric is not as innocuous as many suppose. As the bishop argues, diversity, equity, and inclusion can have only relative and derivative rather than absolute and fundamental value, and some forms of them are bad. I’ll summarize Barron’s points and then add some reflections of my own. As he acknowledges, there are obvious respects in which diversity, equity, and inclusion can be good. The diversity or variety that we find in the natural and social orders reflects the richness of being; justice requires equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and the like; and certain forms of exclusion from participation in the political and economic orders are gravely unjust, such as the slavery that existed in the American south before the Civil War. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, Barron says, are valuable insofar as they facilitate the realization of fundamental and absolute values, such as justice and love (where love is defined as willing the good of another).
At the same time, as Bishop Barron points out, there are other respects in which diversity, equity, and inclusion can be bad. A social order can exist only when its members recognize a common good, and principles that transcend the interests of individuals and unite them into a whole. Thus, a degree of diversity that would allow even for the rejection of any such binding principles, or any common good, would destroy the social order.
As Barron also notes, some inequities are a consequence precisely of the diversity of strengths, interests, etc. that naturally exist among human beings. They cannot be eliminated, and to try to eliminate them would entail totalitarianism. Here Bishop Barron is simply reiterating a theme that is longstanding in Catholic social teaching. In Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII taught:
It is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition.
In Humanum Genus, Leo wrote:
No one doubts that all men are equal one to another, so far as regards their common origin and nature, or the last end which each one has to attain, or the rights and duties which are thence derived. But, as the abilities of all are not equal, as one differs from another in the powers of mind or body, and as there are very many dissimilarities of manner, disposition, and character, it is most repugnant to reason to endeavor to confine all within the same measure, and to extend complete equality to the institutions of civic life.
Criticizing the Sillonist religious socialist movement in the encyclical Notre Charge Apostolique, Pope St. Pius X states:
The Sillon says that it is striving to establish an era of equality which, by that very fact, would be also an era of greater justice. Thus, to the Sillon, every inequality of condition is an injustice, or at least, a diminution of justice. Here we have a principle that conflicts sharply with the nature of things, a principle conducive to jealously, injustice, and subversive to any social order.
Similar statements can be found in the teaching of other popes and in the tradition more generally.
Inclusion, argues Barron, cannot be absolute, for the same reason diversity cannot be. Inclusion is always inclusion within some social order. But, again, any such order requires, for its very existence, commitment to common principles and a particular way of life defined by those principles. Any society must therefore exclude those who refuse to abide by those principles. Nor, as Bishop Barron notes, does the Church’s openness to all show otherwise. As he says, the Church welcomes everyone, but only on Christ’s terms, not their own.
Much more can be said. To reinforce Bishop Barron’s point that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not absolute values, we should note that there are obvious respects in which they will not be present in Heaven. For example, there will be no diversity of religious belief in Heaven. The central feature of Heaven is the beatific vision – the direct, clear, and distinct knowledge of the very essence of the triune God. Hence, in Heaven, there will be no atheists, no anti-Trinitarians, no pantheists, etc. Such errors will not be possible. (Am I saying that no one who is presently guilty of such errors about the divine nature will be saved, not even by invincible ignorance? No, I am saying that even if they are saved, they will not persist in those errors in Heaven, because the beatific vision precludes that.)
What about equity? The Church teaches that, in the afterlife, not all will be rewarded equally or punished equally. For example, the Council of Florence states that those who are saved “are straightaway received into heaven and clearly behold the triune God as he is, yet one person more perfectly than another according to the difference of their merits.” Similarly, the council teaches, the damned “go down straightaway to hell to be punished, but with unequal pains.” For not all the righteous are equally righteous, and not all the wicked are equally wicked. In this way, some inequities are destined to persist forever.
St. Therese of Lisieux proposed a famous analogy in her autobiography The Story of a Soul:
I once told you how astonished I was that God does not give equal glory in heaven to all His chosen. I was afraid they were not at all equally happy. You made me bring Daddy’s tumbler and put it by the side of my thimble. You filled them both with water and asked me which was fuller. I told you they were both full to the brim and that it was impossible to put more water in them than they could hold. And so, Mother darling, you made me understand that in heaven God will give His chosen their fitting glory and that the last will have no reason to envy the first.
End quote. But doesn’t God love everyone equally? No, he does not. As Aquinas argues, although there is a sense in which God loves all things equally, insofar as it is the same one act of will by which he loves everything, there is also a sense in which he clearly loves some more than others, which is reflected precisely in the fact that he has not given the same degree of goodness to all:
In this way we are said to love that one more than another, for whom we will a greater good, though our will is not more intense. In this way we must needs say that God loves some things more than others. For since God’s love is the cause of goodness in things, as has been said, no one thing would be better than another, if God did not will greater good for one than for another… God is said to have equally care of all, not because by His care He deals out equal good to all, but because He administers all things with a like wisdom and goodness…
It must needs be… that God loves more the better things. For it has been shown, that God's loving one thing more than another is nothing else than His willing for that thing a greater good: because God's will is the cause of goodness in things; and the reason why some things are better than others, is that God wills for them a greater good. Hence it follows that He loves more the better things. (Summa Theologiae I.20.3-4)
Moreover, the love that God has for us, and the love he commands us to have for others, is by no means unqualified, and by no means does it entail an attitude of inclusiveness toward evildoers. Aquinas writes:
Two things may be considered in the sinner: his nature and his guilt. According to his nature, which he has from God, he has a capacity for happiness, on the fellowship of which charity is based, as stated above, wherefore we ought to love sinners, out of charity, in respect of their nature. On the other hand their guilt is opposed to God, and is an obstacle to happiness. Wherefore, in respect of their guilt whereby they are opposed to God, all sinners are to be hated, even one's father or mother or kindred, according to Luke 12:26. For it is our duty to hate, in the sinner, his being a sinner, and to love in him, his being a man capable of bliss; and this is to love him truly, out of charity, for God's sake…
As the Philosopher observes (Ethic. ix, 3), when our friends fall into sin, we ought not to deny them the amenities of friendship, so long as there is hope of their mending their ways, and we ought to help them more readily to regain virtue than to recover money, had they lost it, for as much as virtue is more akin than money to friendship. When, however, they fall into very great wickedness, and become incurable, we ought no longer to show them friendliness. (Summa Theologiae II-II.25.6)
In this last passage, Aquinas echoes Christ’s teaching on reproving the sinner:
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. (Matthew 18:15-17)
Of course, this refusal of inclusiveness is, in this life, not absolute. Even the seemingly most obstinate sinners may end up repenting after all – one of the purposes of excommunication is, in fact, to try to help the excommunicated person to see the gravity of his situation – and when they do repent they must be shown the friendliness we temporarily denied them. But if they do not repent before death, there will be no inclusiveness shown them in the afterlife, as scripture, the Fathers, popes, creeds, councils, and catechisms clearly and irreformably teach (and as Bishop Barron agrees, by the way). There will then be no DEI office to which they might appeal.
Needless to say, many contemporary Christians cite scriptural passages that speak of forgiveness, mercy, and the like in defense of a radical inclusiveness and universalism, while ignoring the many passages that would exclude such an interpretation. They peddle these selective misreadings as if they represented some new and deeper insight into the Gospel. In fact there is no new insight here at all, but just that ancient error of hairesis or heresy – “choosing” the part of Christian doctrine you like and ignoring the part you don’t like, inevitably distorting the former in the process. The true sources of radical egalitarianism are to be found, not in the teaching of Christ, but in a disorder of the soul first analyzed by Plato and in apostasy from Christianity.
Related posts:
Liberty, equality, fraternity?
January 9, 2022
Geach on authority and consistency
If the reader will indulge me, here is one more post inspired by Peter Geach – specifically, this time, by some themes in his book
Truth and Hope
. Among the topics Geach covers are logical consistency, believing something on the basis of authority, and the relationship between authority and consistency. The points he makes are by no means purely academic. Indeed, they are relevant to understanding current ecclesiastical and political crises. For among the reasons so many people today have come to distrust authorities in the Church, government, science, media, etc. is these authorities’ lack of consistency. Consistency
Logical consistency is sometimes treated as if it were something only a pedant would concern himself with. Consider Walt Whitman’s celebrated, but quite stupid, remark: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Similarly, Emerson asserted: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” The implication of such remarks is that there is something more, something deeper, in the thought of a self-contradictory person than in that of a consistent person. In fact, the opposite is the case. There is less in the thinking of a self-contradictory person, not more.
As Aquinas notes, a contradiction “implies being and non-being at the same time” (Summa Theologiae I.25.3). Hence it takes back with one hand what it seemed to be giving with the other. Consider, for instance, the notion of a round square. To posit a square is indeed to posit a kind of thing. But to posit that that thing is round is, as it were, precisely to take away the squareness (since the roundness is incompatible with the squareness), and thus to take away the thing itself. And the roundness goes with it too, since it now lacks anything in which it might inhere. Thus, the notion of a round square does not give you bothroundness and squareness. (“Multitudes!”) Rather, it gives you neither roundness norsquareness.
The same is true of any system of ideas that incorporates a contradiction. It is self-annihilating, in just the same way that the notion of a round square is. Logic students are familiar with the dictum that anything follows from a contradiction. The Whitmans and Emersons of the world might think: “Anything? Great! Multitudes!” But once again they’d be wrong. What follows instead is that no proposition in a self-contradictory system can stand. The presence of the contradiction makes it possible to refute every one of them. It is not some tonic that makes the system more fruitful, but a cancer that eats its way through the whole. Hence, a self-contradictory system of ideas doesn’t give you everythingyou want. It gives you precisely nothing.
This brings us to Geach. Criticizing those who characterize inconsistency as merely a kind of relation holding between statements in a discourse, he points out that in fact it inevitably has bad practical consequences:
In fiction, indeed, inconsistency is a merely internal fault, and does not matter so long as it does not offend the reader. This holds precisely because the indicative sentences in a work of fiction do not latch onto reality: the author and the reader merely make believe that they do so. When discourse is meant to latch onto reality, then inconsistency matters: not because falling into inconsistency means perpetrating a specially bad sort of error, logical falsehood; but because inconsistent discourse inevitably has some non-logical fault. Like it or not, an inconsistent history will somewhere be factually false, an inconsistent set of orders or instructions cannot all be carried out, an inconsistent moral code will at some juncture be prescribing morally objectionable conduct, and so on. (p. 38)
Geach does not bring up nominalism in this connection, but he could have. The nominalist takes our concepts to be mere artifacts of language, free creations of the mind bearing no necessary connection to mind-independent reality. The realist, by contrast, takes concepts to reflect the natures of things themselves. Contradiction in a system of ideas is bound to seem less dire in its practical consequences on the former sort of view than on the latter. I’ll come back to this.
It is sometimes suggested that science might give us reason to revise logic by giving up consistency, but as Geach notes, this is simply muddleheaded. It has the same self-defeating character that any other inconsistent positon does. He writes:
As for proposals to bend logic, logic must remain rigid if it is to serve as a lever to overthrow unsatisfactory theories; otherwise refutation of a theory by contrary facts could always be staved off by enfeebling the logic that shows the contrariety.
Logic can never be constrained to withdraw a thesis by reason of a rival thesis established in some other discipline; for in a sense logic has no theses, being merely concerned with what follows from what. Logic is like a constitutional queen of the sciences: a queen who can never initiate legislation, but unlike the British monarch can put in a veto – on the score of inconsistency or fallacious reasoning. (p. 39)
The very practice of science presupposes consistency – most fundamentally, the consistency of theories with their evidential basis and with each other. Therefore, to give up consistency, even in the name of science, is to give up science. But neither can any claim of theology justify us in giving up consistency, as Geach rightly insists, despite his insistence having, he reports, “sometimes offended pious ears” (p. 41).
You might think those ears are always orthodox ones, but in recent years it is those who would revise traditional teaching who are most likely to flout the demands of logic. Typically they do so in the name of Christian mercy, but like those who would abandon consistency in the name of science, this is simply muddleheaded and self-defeating. Suppose you argue that mercy requires us to permit unrepentant adulterers to take Holy Communion, despite this being inconsistent with the Church’s perennial and infallible teaching. Strict consistency with traditional teaching is less important than showing mercy, or so you argue.
Yet what you are claiming is precisely that not permitting adulterers to take Holy Communion would be inconsistent with the mercy Christ commands us to show the sinner. (To be sure, this claim is false – there is no inconsistency at all, since Christ makes repentance a condition of forgiveness – but that is your claim.) So, you can hardly dismiss consistency when your critics point out that your view contradicts Church teaching, because your whole case itself rests on an appeal to consistency. By rejecting logic’s demand for consistency when defending your own position, you undermine that position itself.
We must, however, immediately note a distinction drawn by Geach. Inconsistency, he points out, is not the same thing as nonsense, though philosophers are not always careful to note the difference (pp. 41-42). When two statements are known to be inconsistent with one another, that presupposes that each has a clear meaning. By contrast, nonsensical assertions do not have a clear meaning. And precisely because they do not, they cannot clearly contradict one another. Logical methodology itself presupposes this distinction. Geach writes:
Reductio ad absurdum works by deriving a patent inconsistency from a set of premises, which shows that one or other of the set is false; this valuable method of proof would be a ridiculous procedure if patent inconsistency were not to be distinguished from unconstruable nonsense. (p. 42)
Now, the “saving grace” (if that is the right phrase for it) of Pope Francis’s own doctrinally problematic statements on matters concerning Holy Communion for adulterers, capital punishment, and the like, is precisely that they do not have a clear meaning, and that he refuses to clarify them. His statements thereby avoid actual inconsistency with past teaching, even as they seem to give wiggle room to those who would like to abandon it.
But they only seem to do so. For suppose a Catholic really does abandon past teaching. Then he either has to give up consistency itself, which entails a self-defeating position for the reasons I have been setting out in this post; or he can preserve consistency and reject just the past teaching, but in that case we will end up with a self-defeating position of another kind, the kind described in my recent post on Geach’s critique of modernism (since by holding that the Church erred in the past, he will have undermined any reason for believing what she teaches now). Hence there is no possible way to accept the pope’s problematic utterances except as imperfect formulations of claims that are consistent with past teaching. Any alternative way of construing them entails a self-defeating position.
One reason people don’t think clearly about these problems is that they don’t strictly think about them at all. Geach makes the important point that grasping the consistency or inconsistency between claims is an exercise of the intellect rather than of the imagination. He notes that “we can imagine things that on reflection are self-contradictory,” and gives the following example:
One of Escher’s engravings shows a stairway running round the four sides of a tower, on which by continual ascent one gets back to the starting point. (p. 43)
One might suppose that, because he can form a mental image like the one in Escher’s drawing, he has thereby grasped that the scenario it represents is really possible. But that is an illusion.
Similarly, those deluded into supposing that allowing unrepentant adulterers to Holy Communion can be made consistent with Christ’s teaching no doubt call to mind all kinds of happy mental images and feelings. For example, they might bring before their mind’s eye a picture of some man who has abandoned his first wife and formed a “new union” with another woman, happily leaving the communion line, being greeted with handshakes and good cheer after Mass, etc. And they might imagine also the unpleasant feelings of guilt this man might suffer if he were told that he is committing mortal sin by doing these things. This mélange of pictures and emotions triggers the word “mercy,” and they are thereby sold on the idea. (Of course, it helps if they do not call to their mind’s eye any images of the wife who was abandoned, what she and her children might be feeling, etc.)
Psychologically, this sort of process can be effective in winning over people of a certain mindset. But logicallyspeaking, it is completely worthless, the sheerest sentimentality. It does exactly nothing to justify departure from the Church’s traditional teaching and practice.
Authority
Perhaps it is clear already what all of this has to do with questions about believing something on the basis of some authority. Geach argues that “it would wholly discredit revelation if it were supposed to proceed from a deity who may lie when he sees fit” (p. 58). To be sure, it doesn’t follow that God might not sometimes allow us to be misled, for as Geach also notes, misleading someone does not entail lying to him. (For example, if you leave the light on when you’re away, a burglar might judge that you’re home and therefore avoid your house. But though he’s been misled, he hasn’t been lied to.) But to posit outright lies in some purported divine revelation would be to undermine confidence in any of it. If what God purportedly has said in this one place is false, why suppose anything else he has said is true?
We saw Geach make a similar point when we recently considered his views about Hell, and it is related to the point he makes against modernism. A purported source of divine revelation is either reliable as a whole, or it is not reliable at all. To be sure, and as Geach acknowledges, we dosometimes trust human beings even when we know they have lied. But the case of a purported divine revelation is different, for (unlike the case of human testimony) we have no independent means of verifying doctrines that are supposed to be knowable only via such revelation.
It is crucial, then, that a purported source of revealed doctrine be consistent. If there is any inconsistency in it, then the inconsistent statements it contains cannot all be true. If they are not all true, then some of what it teaches is false, which (again) undermines the credibility of the whole. This is the case not only with scripture, but also with all statements claimed to have been taught by the Church in a definitive way, such as decrees of ecclesiastical councils, infallible papal pronouncements, and doctrines constantly reiterated by the ordinary Magisterium of the Church. To allow that there is error in any of this would undermine the credibility of all of it. In response to the suggestion that ecclesial authority may, by fiat, put forward some new teaching that contradicts the old, Geach says:
Bishops come and bishops go; and one Pope passeth, another cometh; ay, Heaven and Earth shall pass; but from the Law of Contradiction not one tittle shall ever pass; for it is the eternal Law of God. (p. 69)
Amen! And before you accuse Geach of subordinating theology to philosophy, note well that he is in fact simply affirming Catholic teaching. For example, in that grand encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope St. Pius X condemned the modernist thesis that theology can contain contradictions. (As the pope wrote: “But when they justify even contradiction, what is it that they will refuse to justify?”)
But there still might seem to be a flavor of paradox here. I may decide to reject some purported source of authoritative revelation, on the grounds that it contradicts itself; or I may judge that it does not contradict itself, and (if I also have some positive reason to think it really did come from God) accept it. But either way, am not I the one making the call? And in that case, do I not make myselfthe ultimate authority? Geach’s response begins as follows:
The question which authority to trust is difficult and inescapable. But we must steeply, most steeply, rebut the sophists who would argue ‘In accepting an authority you are relying on your Private Judgment that the authority is reliable: so Private Judgment trumps authority.’ Inevitably my judgment is my judgment, my very own judgment, thus my Private Judgment; but this is a mere tautology, from which nothing interesting can follow. (pp. 50-51)
What Geach refers to here is, of course, a standard Protestant objection to Catholicism. The nature of the fallacy identified by Geach might be clearer when we consider that a parallel accusation could be flung back at the Protestant, who claims to follow only scripture: “In accepting scripture you are relying on your Private Judgment that scripture is reliable: so your Private Judgment trumps scripture.” The Protestant might respond, quite correctly, that the fact that he has judged scripture to be authoritative simply doesn’t entail that he puts his own authority above that of scripture. For in justifying this judgement, he is not appealing to any purported authority of his own in the first place. But exactly the same response is open to the Catholic. The fact that he has judged the Church to be authoritative simply doesn’t entail that he puts his own authority above that of the Church. For in justifying this judgement, he too is not appealing to any purported authorityof his own in the first place. Geach expands on the point as follows:
[W]hen I decide to follow one authority rather than another, I am not in effect setting up myself up as a superior authority. It would be quite difficult for me to give good reasons for trusting one lawyer or doctor rather than another; but such trust on my part need not be merely blind, nor on the other hand am I claiming to know more law than my lawyer and more medicine than my doctor. (p. 51)
I may judge one doctor to be trustworthy and another to be a quack. But it doesn’t follow that I claim to have greater medical expertise than the former. By the same token, when I judge one purported source of divine revelation (a book, a prophet, a Church, or whatever) to be genuine, and another to be bogus, it doesn’t follow that I claim greater expertise about divine revelation than the former.
As noted already, Geach acknowledges that in the case of fallible human beings, we do sometimes trust them even though we know them to have lied. Similarly, we do not always reject the authority of an expert simply because he has been inconsistent on this or that occasion. But there are limits. It cannot fail to undermine public trust when government officials, media sources, etc. repeatedly and shamelessly say inconsistent things. (Some recent examples: Right-wing mass demonstrations during the Covid-19 pandemic were dangerous super-spreader events, but left-wing mass demonstrations were not. Questioning the integrity of the 2016 election upholds democracy, but questioning the integrity of the 2020 election undermines democracy. The left-wing riots that occurred throughout the summer of 2020 were “mostly peaceful protests,” but the right-wing riot that occurred on January 6 of 2021 was an “insurrection” and “worse than 9/11.” Skepticism about Covid-19 vaccines is reasonable when Trump is president, but irrational when Biden is president. To fail to wear a mask in public is to put grandma’s life at risk, except when Democratic politicians or journalists fail to do so. Preventing a woman from killing her unborn child violates her right over her own body, but forcing her to take a vaccine injection does not violate her right over her own body. Etc.)
Churchmen too, when they exercise their fallible governing authority (as opposed to infallible ex cathedra papal definitions), risk losing the trust of the faithful if that exercise shows inconsistency. In my essay “Pope Francis’s Scarlet Letter,” I discussed the double standard the pope has shown toward progressives and traditionalists – bending over backwards to accommodate the former even though they widely dissent from the infallible teaching of millennia, while harshly punishing the latter because some among them question more recent and fallible teaching. (That essay was recently reprinted in Peter Kwasniewski’s excellent anthology From Benedict’s Peace to Francis’s War: Catholics Respond to the Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes on the Latin Mass.) The Vatican has recently doubled down on this harshness in a Responsa ad dubiaprompted by Traditionis Custodes. Into the bargain, this response has added to the double standard evident in Traditionis directives that are problematic in light of canon law.
A recent article at Rorate Caeli notes how, if the principles of Amoris Laetitia and some other earlier pronouncements of Pope Francis were applied to the interpretation of Traditionis Custodes and the Responsa ad dubia, they would essentially gut the latter documents of any binding force. This is exactly what we should expect, given the points made above when discussing Geach. Since anything follows from a contradiction, an internally inconsistent set of principles inevitably subverts itself.
Earlier I mentioned nominalism, and historically (for example, in the case of William of Ockham), nominalism has had a close connection with voluntarism. Voluntarism holds that the will is prior to the intellect, in contrast to the “intellectualist” position defended by Aquinas, which holds that the intellect is prior to the will. For the intellectualist, the will is and ought to be the servant of the intellect. Hence the will cannot be rightly ordered if the intellect is not. And legislation, which reflects the will of the legislator, cannot be good if it does not conform to reason. For the thoroughgoing voluntarist, by contrast, the will is the intellect’s master rather than its servant, and it does not answer to the intellect’s rational scruples. (It is because metaphysical realism would put strict rational constraints on what we might intelligibly be said to will that nominalism is attractive to the voluntarist.)
Now, intellectualism is the correct view, and as I noted in a post from a few years ago, traditional Catholic teaching clearly affirms it. But the ecclesial and the political orders seem today to be dominated by what, in that same post, I labeled “the voluntarist personality” – a personality type which approximates what human beings would be like if voluntarism were true. The voluntarist personality type tends to be stubbornly willful and excessively emotional, but to have a relatively weak or poorly developed intellect. Hence it is highly impatient with calm deliberation, clear and explicit lines of reasoning, carefully drawn distinctions, and so on. It tends to evaluate ideas and policies, not in terms of the arguments or evidence that might be adduced for or against them, but rather in terms of the motives that it sees, or thinks it sees, in those who advocate them and those who oppose them. It thus tends toward self-righteous moralizing in defense of its favored positions, and toward ad hominem attacks against those who disagree. Naturally, it is not inclined to try rationally to persuade dissenters, but prefers instead to get its way by dictatorial command where it can, and by rhetorical manipulation, threats, and intimidation where it cannot.
The voluntarist personality tends to conflate authority with raw power, and thus inconsistency in its demands does not bother it. “I’m in charge, and this is my will. Just do it, and don’t bother me with quibbles about logic and evidence!” The trouble is that voluntarism is false, and human beings are rational animals. Thus, in the long run, when those who govern them do so in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner, they will rightly see in this not the proper exercise of authority, but rather the abuse of authority. They will be tempted to schism and rebellion – which the ruler with a voluntarist personality will rightly decry, while being utterly oblivious to the fact that he is the one provoking it. The voluntarist personality tends to see in dictatorial fiat the apotheosis of authority, when in fact it is the corruption of authority, and threatens its dissolution. But here, I should note, I go beyond anything discussed by Geach.
Related posts:
Geach’s argument against modernism
January 1, 2022
New Year���s open thread
Dear reader, let���s open up the discussion this year by letting you open it up. It���s time to get that otherwise off-topic comment of yours that I keep deleting out of your system at last. For in these open thread posts, everything is on-topic, from Marshall McLuhan to Malcom McLaren, from Duke Ellington to Beef Wellington, from Plato to Play-Doh. Just keep things civil and constructive, please. Previous open threads archived here.
New Year’s open thread
Dear reader, let’s open up the discussion this year by letting you open it up. It’s time to get that otherwise off-topic comment of yours that I keep deleting out of your system at last. For in these open thread posts, everything is on-topic, from Marshall McLuhan to Malcom McLaren, from Duke Ellington to Beef Wellington, from Plato to Play-Doh. Just keep things civil and constructive, please. Previous open threads archived here.
December 29, 2021
Geach on Hell
Let’s take another trip into the philosophical and theological gold mine that is Peter Geach’s book
Providence and Evil
, and this time consider his chapter on Hell. At first I wondered whether it was appropriate to close out the year with a post on a subject so grim and unpleasant. But on second thought it occurred to me that it is an ideal topic. What better preparation for forming New Year’s resolutions than a reminder of where we are all headed if we do not repent of whatever sins we remain attached to? I’ve written on this subject many times and will not repeat here everything I’ve said before. (See the links below.) The aim of this post is not to present a general exposition and defense of the doctrine of Hell, but simply to consider what Geach had to say about it.
Geach had no patience for humbug, and he begins by clearing away some of it:
We cannot be Christians, followers of Christ, we cannot even know what it is to be a Christian, unless the Gospels give at least an approximately correct account of Christ’s teaching. And if the Gospel account is even approximately correct, then it is perfectly clear that according to that teaching many men are irretrievably lost. Men like McTaggart and Bertrand Russell have noticed this aspect of Christ’s teaching and decided that Christianity is incredible; they have thus paid Christ the minimal honour of observing what he has said and taking it seriously – an honour denied him by those who use their own fancy about the ‘spirit’ of Christ’s teaching as a means of deciding what Christ must have said or meant. It is less clear, I admit, that the fate of the lost according to that teaching is to be endless misery rather than ultimate destruction. But universalism is not a live option for a Christian. (pp. 123-24)
Now, I disagree with Geach’s remark that it is less clear from Christ’s teaching whether it is endless misery or ultimate destruction that is the fate of the wicked. (I think Christ clearly meant the former.) I also disagree with Geach’s view (which he goes on to express in this chapter) that the possibility of damnation, and indeed of any afterlife at all, are matters we can know about only from special divine revelation rather than via philosophical argument. These are topics I address in those earlier posts. But I think Geach is absolutely correct that universalism cannot possibly be reconciled with what the Gospels tell us Christ actually said. I have discussed the overwhelming textual evidence elsewhere.
Geach notes a couple of important lessons to be drawn from the fact that Christianity clearly teaches the doctrine of Hell. For one thing, this fact poses a serious difficulty for one common skeptical objection against the Faith:
Christianity is often supposed to be a matter of wishful thinking; but the accusation can scarcely hold good against a Christian who firmly accepts the dogma of Hell, and believes that he and those he loves, just as they may die of cancer, are in jeopardy of Hell. (p. 134)
For another thing, if the dogma of Hell really were a wicked doctrine (as universalists maintain), then, as Geach argues (following McTaggart, who made the same point for very different, skeptical reasons) we could have no good grounds for believing a purported divine revelation that teaches this dogma (pp. 134-36). For example, it would be quite ridiculous to hold that the Bible really is divinely inspired, but then go on to say that it teaches a doctrine (the dogma of Hell) that is evil and must be rejected. For if scripture is wrong about something that important, why trust anything else it says? Its inclusion of the doctrine of Hell would in that case entail either that the deity who inspired it is evil and thus cannot be trusted; or (to add a little to what Geach says) that not all of scripture really is divinely inspired after all – in which case, why suppose the rest of it really is?
Though Geach does not make the connection, there is a clear similarity here to the argument we saw him give elsewhere in the book to the effect that theological modernism is self-defeating. It is no wonder that universalists try to pull off the trick of simultaneously straining hard to pretend to see their doctrine in scripture, while shutting their eyes tight lest they see the doctrine of Hell that is clearly taught there. Frankly to acknowledge what scripture actually says would require them to give up Christianity altogether. (Nor is it surprising that these purportedly more pacific souls are typically so nasty to those who disagree with them – gaslighting puts a strain on those doing it no less than on those subjected to it.)
Geach makes an interesting related point against the claim that anyone is predestined to Hell:
[This] would make God directly responsible for the lies men tell in the same way as for the utterances of his holy Prophets, and thus the revelational basis of the belief is wholly destroyed. (p. 136)
In other words, if everything we do is strictly necessitated by God, then he is the author of lies in the same way in which he is the author of purported truths. So how could we tell which are which, in matters we can know about only through revelation from him? (To offer an analogy – mine, not Geach’s – suppose someone who communicated to you only via email not only sent you emails with messages he said were true, but also caused you to get emails, purportedly from other people, with messages you knew to be false. Why would you believe the first set of emails if you knew he was also behind the second set?) In Geach’s view, “predestinarian theories like those of Jonathan Edwards” are thus self-defeating in the way he elsewhere argues that modernism is (p. 136).
With the mainstream Christian tradition, Geach holds that damnation is not inevitable full stop, but rather is inevitable only givenchoices that we freely make. Still, it is inevitable given those choices. “God does allow men to sin; and misery is the natural, not the arbitrarily inflicted, consequence of sin to the sinner” (p. 138). But wouldn’t it be pointless for God to create a world in which some people end up never fulfilling the purpose for which they were made, even if this is a result of their own folly?
No, this would not be pointless. Geach compares such people to non-human living things that are destroyed (say, by being eaten by other living things) and therefore do not fulfill their own individual purpose, but nevertheless still fulfill larger purposes within the natural order as a whole (such as providing sustenance to the animals that eat them). He writes:
Wicked men, who by their own choice fail to achieve their chief end, nevertheless have their place in the Divine order of things… But we must here imagine that a chisel volunteers to be used to hack the wood, in the fatuous malicious belief that the carver is thus enabled to do harm to the wood. Extreme villainy is the necessary means to produce such virtue as that of Thomas More or Maksymilian Kolbe: necessary, because the virtue is exercised in reaction to the villainy, the villainy is the subject-matter of the virtue. God allows the villainy in order to have the virtue. (p. 126)
Now, as I have argued elsewhere (following Aquinas), repentance after death is metaphysically impossible. The damned will forever be miserable, but precisely because they will forever choose the evil that generates and merits this misery. Precisely because this misery is merited, though, Geach argues that their continued existence after death serves a larger purpose no less than their existence in this life does:
In this life this wickedness serves to perfect the virtue of God’s friends; hereafter, the misery that comes from their evil will serves for the praise of God’s justice. God has never promised to make all men happy: on the contrary, as Butler argued in the Analogy, the lesson that a man may by his own foolish choice do himself irreparable harm is written in this world in letters that he who runs may read. Immortality accompanied by vice is, as Aristotle said, the greatest of misfortunes. (p. 138)
Now, some will object that it would make the savedmiserable to know that their damned loved ones, or indeed anyone damned, is suffering. But here there is a failure of imagination. People too often imagine the weak but not altogether contemptible creatures so many human beings are, with their good aspects alongside their defects, struggling to be better but repeatedly failing. Then they imagine such a person suffering forever, and the punishment seems disproportionate to the failings. But as I discussed in another post, that is the wrong way to think about the matter. If one can imagine the state of a damned soul at all, it would be better to think, to a first approximation, of the sort of person who stubbornly refuses even to try to reform certain bad behavior, even when his loved ones gently plead with him to do so and even when he knows that it is hurting him.
If you have ever known such a person, you know that it is very difficult to feel sorry for him, or at least to feel sorry for him with respect to what he suffers as a result of such willfulness. One thinks: “If you simply insist on acting that way despite knowing what it is doing to you, you deserve what you get!” Now, the person who is damned is, after death, reduced to that sort of person, and to nothing more than that sort of person. Whatever residual possibility for good there was prior to death drops away, leaving only the impenitent core. Geach writes:
People say rather lightly that they could not bear for a damned soul to be punished unendingly; but someone confronted with the damned would find it impossible to wish that things so evil should be happy – particularly when the misery is seen as the direct and natural consequence of the guilt. At best they could wish that such a thing should no longer be; that such guilt and misery should no longer defile the world. (p. 139)
More on that last point in a moment. First let me note an interesting suggestion Geach makes about the nature of the pains of sense that will torment the damned. In an earlier post we looked at what Geach has to say about original sin, and about the manner in which nature has been damaged by the Fall. In this life, God permits sinful human beings to abuse the things that make up the natural order, as they do when they use these things to serve their corrupt purposes. But in the next life, Geach proposes, God will no longer allow this (p. 146). The damned will seek to use the objects comprising the natural world for evil ends, but will find that they are unable to do so. In this way they will be endlessly frustrated and tormented by a redeemed natural order. (To appeal to an analogy that is obviously mine rather than Geach’s, think of the damned on the model of those in the Marvel movies who are unable to pick up Thor’s hammer, despite its being to all appearances just one medium-sized object alongside all the others – the reason being, not that they lack physical strength, but rather that they are not worthy.)
As to the duration of the punishment of the damned, Geach tentatively offers a couple of speculative scenarios. One of them involves a branching timeline scenario with which I am not sympathetic given my own views about the nature of time, and I will leave that to one side. The other goes like this:
Imagine a man condemned to work out for ever the decimal expansion of π: a dreadful fate for many of us to imagine. He would always have a new digit to work out, however far he got, so his task would never end. But if he worked out the first digit in half an hour, the second in a quarter of an hour, and so on, his speed of calculation doubling each time, then if he started at two o’clock no digit would remain to be calculated after three o’clock. (pp. 148-49)
While this is physically impossible, Geach allows, he thinks it is not logicallyimpossible, and that a resurrected person could be freed from the mere physical impossibility. But then, he continues:
So an unending series of miseries could be fitted into a finite time-stretch. In that case, a man condemned to Hell might look forward to a series of miserable experiences of which he could say with truth ‘This will never end’; and nevertheless one day the Saints might be able to say of him and of all the damned ‘Thank God that’s over.’ (p. 149)
The scenario is certainly intriguing. But here too I’m skeptical. If we think of these ever shorter stretches of time within the hour as all actually existing, then it seems we face Zeno-type paradoxes. If, to avoid those, we take an Aristotelian approach of regarding the ever shorter stretches as existing only potentially within the hour, then we don’t have the actually infinite collection of miseries Geach posits. Hence, it seems to me, Geach’s proposal to avoid making Hell a non-stopper is a non-starter.
Related posts:
December 25, 2021
The still, small voice of Christmas
A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:11-13) Among the lessons of Christmas is the truth of the principle illustrated by this famous Old Testament passage. We often expect, or at least desire, special divine assistance to be instant and dramatic, like a superhero swooping to the rescue in a Marvel movie. And we lose hope when that doesn’t happen. But God only rarely works that way, and such dramatics have to be rare lest grace smother nature. Special divine assistance is in the ordinary course of things subtle and gradual – a still, small voice rather than a whirlwind, earthquake, or fire – but nevertheless unmistakable when the big picture is kept in view.
At the time of Christ’s nativity, the hope and expectation of Israel was a Messiah who would free the people from servitude, and in particular from subjection to the Roman Empire. And that is indeed what God provided, but not in the manner anticipated. The Messiah arrived, not leading an army in pitched battle, but as a lowly infant in an obscure village. The servitude he freed us from is the most grievous of all, enslavement to sin. And he accomplished something much grander than the mere conquest of the Empire – he converted it. This played out over the course of centuries, and only after much shedding of the blood of his followers. But the end result is undeniable, and made an immeasurably greater difference to world history than a mere victory in battle would have. As his enemy Julian the Apostate lamented after failing to restore the old order Christ upended: “You have conquered, O Galilean!"
It is a lesson that bears repeating when the hope, faith, and indeed charity of many are challenged in the face of seemingly unprecedented crises facing the world and the Church. We cry out to God for aid – and we want it now, and in this manner – and we cannot fathom why he has permitted things to go on as they have for years, indeed decades. But five years, or fifty years, or five hundred – what is that to God? And if he wills to rescue his Church no more swiftly or theatrically – but also no less surely – than the manner in which he first built it, what is that to us?
If we do not perceive his action, in our own lives or in the Church, it may be that we are looking for it in the wrong place – in something analogous to wind, earthquake, or fire. It may be that it is to be found instead in something like the still, small voice that spoke to Elijah, and from the manger in Bethlehem.
Related posts:
December 13, 2021
Western cultural suicide as apostasy (Updated)
In his classic book
Suicide of the West
, James Burnham famously characterized liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” I’ve been meaning for some time to write up an essay on the book. This isn’t it. But Burnham’s thesis came to mind when reading Michael Anton’s essay “Unprecedented”in the latest New Criterion, because the phenomena Anton cites clearly confirm Burnham’s analysis. Ours is a civilization in decline, and at a rapidly accelerating pace. That isn’t new in human history. But the precise manner in which it is disintegrating seems to be unprecedented, which is the reason for the title of Anton’s essay. What has effectively become the ideology of the ruling classes, which goes by many names – political correctness, “wokeness,” “critical social justice,” the “successor Ideology,” the baizuo mentality, and so on – manifests a perverse self-destructiveness and nihilism that, as Anton argues, appears sui generis.
This ideology, now embraced wholeheartedly by our elites and propagated by them in all the major institutions of society, teaches hatred of their own country and their own civilization as somehow uniquely malign and oppressive. It encourages foreigners and immigrants to regard the United States and the West in general with the same hostility. Affluent left-wing whites have also adopted an ethnic self-hatred that is unparalleled in history, enthusiastically embracing the demonization of their “whiteness” as the source of all evil in the world. Yet these forms of oikophobiaor hatred of one’s own are prescribed by them only for Westerners and white people – non-Westerners and non-whites, however bloody or oppressive the histories of their own people, are encouraged only ever to celebrate their heritage.
Even more radical, though, is this ideology’s attack on the very foundation of all social order, the family, and the distinction and relations between the sexes that is the family’s own basis. Every form of sexual degeneracy is celebrated, and even the most timid criticism of it shrilly denounced as “bigotry.” The rarest kind of sexual activity may be that which actually results in children – despite that being what sex exists for in the first place – and marriage rates and birthrates are declining significantly. Norms governing the roles of fathers and mothers and the relations between the sexes are condemned as “patriarchal.” Many are alienated even from their own sex, “self-identifying” instead as one of up to 63 imagined alternative “genders.”
As Anton notes, outright ugliness is aggressively promoted in all areas of culture, from architecture to the arts to advertising. Movies and music endlessly obsess over the deviant, the disordered, and the criminal, while ridiculing the normal. Bodies are ever more thoroughly tattooed, pierced, and clothed in amorphous garb that smothers rather than enhances femininity or masculinity. Obese or emaciated models stare out from advertisements with expressions of sullen defiance. Conventional standards of beauty, like those of morality, are condemned as “oppressive” and “bigoted.”
Basic law and order too is condemned in the same terms. Police are demonized, defunded, and demoralized. Many offenses are decriminalized, many laws that remain on the books are left unenforced, and many who are arrested for breaking the laws that are still enforced are let back onto the streets without bail. Looting and vandalism are excused or even approved of. Drug addicts and the mentally ill are permitted to take over sidewalks and defecate in the streets, though this benefits neither them nor anyone else.
The educational system inculcates into the young this nihilism and oikophobia, and condemns standards of excellence as (you guessed it) just further examples of “oppression” and “bigotry.” “Progress” is conceived of in terms of the endless ferreting out of yet further norms that might be subverted, and the death spiral that this entails now seems to be reaching its inevitable climax.
It is the societal self-hatred that all of this evinces that in Anton’s view makes it unique in the annals of civilizational collapse, and it is what brought Burnham’s analysis to my mind. What accounts for it?
Part of the story is that we are victims of our own success. The truth, of course, is that modern Western society is not oppressive (except, now, toward those who resist the cultural decline just described and try to shore up traditional standards). It is freer and more prosperous than any society in history. The fact that it tolerates even the odious malcontents who spread “wokeness” like a cancer through the body politic, and indeed has now adopted this ideology as its own, itself demonstrates how free it is. The fact that the entire system, though highly dysfunctional, has not yet collapsed from this cancer shows how prosperous it is. A society needs a high degree of affluence in order to limp along, at least for a while, as the family unit and basic law and order crumble.
But liberty and affluence breed decadence. The wealthier and freer people are, the more they tend to find unendurable any residual discomfort or restraint on the indulgence of desire. Elsewhere I have discussed in some detail Plato’s account of how oligarchical societies tend to decay into egalitarian licentiousness. And as Nietzsche observes in Beyond Good and Evil:
There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence. (201)
If this is true even of criminal activity, it is naturally going to be true of non-criminal forms of deviance. A “pathologically soft and tender” society cannot endure the thought that people who do shameful things might be made to feel shame. Hence it will frantically lower or abandon standards in order to pander to every weirdo or pervert who whines that his favorite brand of deviancy has not been afforded sufficient respect.
Yet while this accounts to some degree for the extent to which norms have collapsed, it does not explain the visceral hostilityof those who work to undermine them. For that we need to factor in the deadly sin of envy, and what Nietzsche called ressentiment, which are the concomitants of radical egalitarianism. As Aquinas teaches, “hatred may arise both from anger and from envy… [but] arises more directly from envy, which looks upon the very good of our neighbor as displeasing and therefore hateful.” The envious person wants to destroy what he cannot achieve or live up to himself. Thus the “woke” are not satisfied merely to have the liberty to flout the standards upheld by “normies.” They want to do dirt on those standards, and indeed utterly to annihilate them. Nietzsche had their number in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
You preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful…
“What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge” – thus [the tarantulas] speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not” – thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy – perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers – erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge…
Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! … [W]hen they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had – power…
Preachers of equality and tarantulas… are sitting in their holes, these poisonous spiders, with their backs turned on life, they speak in favor of life, but only because they wish to hurt. They wish to hurt those who now have power. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 211-13)
Now, such hatred naturally has a tendency to subvert reason. But as Plato and Aquinas teach, it is sexual vice, among all vices, that has the greatest tendency to destroy rationality. Sexual desire can seriously cloud the intellect even in the best of circumstances, but when its objects are contra naturam, indulgence makes the very idea of an objective, natural order of things hateful. Wokeness, which marries the deadly sin of envy to that of lust, must inevitably give rise to ever more bizarre manifestations of outright irrationality.
So, affluence breeds softness which breeds egalitarianism which breeds licentiousness which breeds madness. This is all just good old fashioned sociopolitical analysis in the classical tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, et al.). And it is a very large part of the story we see playing out around us. But I submit that even this does not quite explain what Anton calls the “unprecedented” nature of our cultural collapse. What I have been describing are entirely natural processes of cultural decay. But there is something beyond the natural order at work here – something truly diabolical in what is going on.
After all, even the pagans of old had some significant understanding of the natural law. That is why the Church could find kindred spirits in the likes of Plato and Aristotle. By contrast, the modern West has largely lost even the moral knowledge that the pagans had. Deviancy was, in the days of the old paganism, largely confined to the affluent upper classes. Today it permeates the whole of the social order.
What happened between their time and ours? Christianity, of course – and then apostasyfrom Christianity. And it is this character of apostasy, I submit, that accounts for the unprecedented and diabolical character of the cultural collapse we are witnessing. The pagans of old had a rough understanding of the natural law. The Catholic faith perfected it, and added to it knowledge of our supernatural end – the beatific vision – and the possibility of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that allow us to achieve that end. But the modern West has abandoned the Faith, and lost, along with it, even the natural virtues, along with these supernatural gifts. The higher one has been raised, the further he has to fall. Or as Christ warns those who do not do well with what he has given them: “For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 13:12).
Now, where does liberalism fit into the story? Liberalism, I submit, was bound to give way to nihilism of the kind embodied in wokeness. As I have argued at length elsewhere, liberalism is essentially a Christian heresy, and its heresy involves a distortion of the Christian conception of nature. In particular, it requires a conception of nature that strips from it any inherent teleology or purpose, and thus yields a distorted conception of natural law. It also makes of the supernatural an alien imposition on nature rather than the completion of it. And as I have also argued, liberalism’s denuded conception of nature leaves the individualist self the sole arbiter of value. Whatever the self does not consent to must come to seem oppressive.
It is true that there is also, alongside its radical individualism, a strongly collectivist element in wokeness, particularly in Critical Race Theory. But this does not undermine the point that wokeness is the fruit of liberal individualism. For one thing, modern forms of collectivism (whether socialism, communism, or the racist collectivism of Nazism and CRT) have arisen precisely as an overreaction to liberal individualism. For another, the collectivism of CRT is highly attenuated by its emphasis on “intersectionality.” When one defines oneself as (say) an undocumented low-income trans lesbian plus-sized person of color with disabilities, who is the victim of oppression by everyone outside this intersection of categories, group identity isn’t doing much work anymore. It’s just another novel expression of individual grievance.
As Nietzsche emphasized, the egalitarianism of modern liberalism and socialism is an inheritance from Christianity, and lacks any rational basis in the absence of its original foundation. But modern forms of egalitarianism are also grotesque distortionsof what Christianity says about human equality. Christianity teaches that all human beings are equally made in God’s image by virtue of their rational nature, and have all been offered the supernatural end of the beatific vision. Wokeness says, contrary to traditional Christian teaching, that human beings are or ought to be equal in every significant respect and that all “inequities” per se are unjust. Christianity teaches that all sinners are equally offered the opportunity for forgiveness, if only they will repent. Wokeness teaches that no repentance is necessary because the things Christianity offers forgiveness for are not really sins. Indeed, the only real sinners are those who uphold the old norms.
In other ways too, wokeness amounts to a counterfeit Christianity that aims to subvert and replace the original. In particular, and as I have argued elsewhere, it has the character of a Manichean Gnostic cult that shares many traits with earlier Gnostic challenges to the Church.
Where will all of this lead? Contra those who worry (or hope) that the woke “successor ideology” will have its boot on our throats for generations, Anton says:
If forced to bet, I would have to place my chips somewhere between imminent collapse and drawn-out decline. I occasionally read theories of triple bank-shots and four-dimensional chess – they really know what they’re doing! – only to marvel. Our regime cannot, at present, unload a cargo ship, stock a store shelf, run a clean election, handle parental complaints at a school board meeting, pass a budget bill, treat a cold variant, keep order in the streets, defeat a third world country, or even evacuate said country cleanly. And that’s to say nothing of all the things it should be doing, that all non-joke countries do, that it refuses to do. If our ruling class has a plan, it would seem to be to destroy the society and institutions from which they, at present, are the largest – one is tempted to say only – beneficiaries. Do they think they can benefit more from the wreckage? Or are they driven by hatreds that blind them to self-interest? Perhaps they’re simply insane?
End quote. My own answer to Anton’s last three questions is “All of the above.” And I think that those who suppose that the current woke hegemony will last indefinitely are deluding themselves. The world is breathtakingly different from what it was even just five decades ago, when I was born. If norms that persisted for millennia can seemingly disintegrate in a single lifetime, why on earth does anyone have the confidence or fear that what has replaced them will last? Especially when it involves an attack on the very cell of society, the family, that is even more radical than what the communist regimes attempted?
In fact, this sick new disorder of things is so utterly contra naturam that it cannot possibly last. The real questions are: How chaotic will its end be? What comes after it? And might the successor to the successor ideology involve a revival of the Faith, apostasy from which has led us into this crisis?
Related reading:
The Gnostic heresy’s political successors
Tyranny of the sovereign individual
District Attorney Michel Foucault
Psychoanalyzing the sexual revolutionary
Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part I: Nietzsche
Liberty, equality, fraternity?
Continetti on post-liberal conservatism
UPDATE 12/15: Some relevant further reading: Michael Lind on "How American Progressives Became French Jacobins," at the Tablet; Chad Pecknold on "Therapists of Decline," at The Postliberal Order; and Scott McConnell's "Is Wokeness Almost Over?" at The American Conservative.
Western cultural suicide as apostasy
In his classic book
Suicide of the West
, James Burnham famously characterized liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” I’ve been meaning for some time to write up an essay on the book. This isn’t it. But Burnham’s thesis came to mind when reading Michael Anton’s essay “Unprecedented”in the latest New Criterion, because the phenomena Anton cites clearly confirm Burnham’s analysis. Ours is a civilization in decline, and at a rapidly accelerating pace. That isn’t new in human history. But the precise manner in which it is disintegrating seems to be unprecedented, which is the reason for the title of Anton’s essay. What has effectively become the ideology of the ruling classes, which goes by many names – political correctness, “wokeness,” “critical social justice,” the “successor Ideology,” the baizuo mentality, and so on – manifests a perverse self-destructiveness and nihilism that, as Anton argues, appears sui generis.
This ideology, now embraced wholeheartedly by our elites and propagated by them in all the major institutions of society, teaches hatred of their own country and their own civilization as somehow uniquely malign and oppressive. It encourages foreigners and immigrants to regard the United States and the West in general with the same hostility. Affluent left-wing whites have also adopted an ethnic self-hatred that is unparalleled in history, enthusiastically embracing the demonization of their “whiteness” as the source of all evil in the world. Yet these forms of oikophobiaor hatred of one’s own are prescribed by them only for Westerners and white people – non-Westerners and non-whites, however bloody or oppressive the histories of their own people, are encouraged only ever to celebrate their heritage.
Even more radical, though, is this ideology’s attack on the very foundation of all social order, the family, and the distinction and relations between the sexes that is the family’s own basis. Every form of sexual degeneracy is celebrated, and even the most timid criticism of it shrilly denounced as “bigotry.” The rarest kind of sexual activity may be that which actually results in children – despite that being what sex exists for in the first place – and marriage rates and birthrates are declining significantly. Norms governing the roles of fathers and mothers and the relations between the sexes are condemned as “patriarchal.” Many are alienated even from their own sex, “self-identifying” instead as one of up to 63 imagined alternative “genders.”
As Anton notes, outright ugliness is aggressively promoted in all areas of culture, from architecture to the arts to advertising. Movies and music endlessly obsess over the deviant, the disordered, and the criminal, while ridiculing the normal. Bodies are ever more thoroughly tattooed, pierced, and clothed in amorphous garb that smothers rather than enhances femininity or masculinity. Obese or emaciated models stare out from advertisements with expressions of sullen defiance. Conventional standards of beauty, like those of morality, are condemned as “oppressive” and “bigoted.”
Basic law and order too is condemned in the same terms. Police are demonized, defunded, and demoralized. Many offenses are decriminalized, many laws that remain on the books are left unenforced, and many who are arrested for breaking the laws that are still enforced are let back onto the streets without bail. Looting and vandalism are excused or even approved of. Drug addicts and the mentally ill are permitted to take over sidewalks and defecate in the streets, though this benefits neither them nor anyone else.
The educational system inculcates into the young this nihilism and oikophobia, and condemns standards of excellence as (you guessed it) just further examples of “oppression” and “bigotry.” “Progress” is conceived of in terms of the endless ferreting out of yet further norms that might be subverted, and the death spiral that this entails now seems to be reaching its inevitable climax.
It is the societal self-hatred that all of this evinces that in Anton’s view makes it unique in the annals of civilizational collapse, and it is what brought Burnham’s analysis to my mind. What accounts for it?
Part of the story is that we are victims of our own success. The truth, of course, is that modern Western society is not oppressive (except, now, toward those who resist the cultural decline just described and try to shore up traditional standards). It is freer and more prosperous than any society in history. The fact that it tolerates even the odious malcontents who spread “wokeness” like a cancer through the body politic, and indeed has now adopted this ideology as its own, itself demonstrates how free it is. The fact that the entire system, though highly dysfunctional, has not yet collapsed from this cancer shows how prosperous it is. A society needs a high degree of affluence in order to limp along, at least for a while, as the family unit and basic law and order crumble.
But liberty and affluence breed decadence. The wealthier and freer people are, the more they tend to find unendurable any residual discomfort or restraint on the indulgence of desire. Elsewhere I have discussed in some detail Plato’s account of how oligarchical societies tend to decay into egalitarian licentiousness. And as Nietzsche observes in Beyond Good and Evil:
There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence. (201)
If this is true even of criminal activity, it is naturally going to be true of non-criminal forms of deviance. A “pathologically soft and tender” society cannot endure the thought that people who do shameful things might be made to feel shame. Hence it will frantically lower or abandon standards in order to pander to every weirdo or pervert who whines that his favorite brand of deviancy has not been afforded sufficient respect.
Yet while this accounts to some degree for the extent to which norms have collapsed, it does not explain the visceral hostilityof those who work to undermine them. For that we need to factor in the deadly sin of envy, and what Nietzsche called ressentiment, which are the concomitants of radical egalitarianism. As Aquinas teaches, “hatred may arise both from anger and from envy… [but] arises more directly from envy, which looks upon the very good of our neighbor as displeasing and therefore hateful.” The envious person wants to destroy what he cannot achieve or live up to himself. Thus the “woke” are not satisfied merely to have the liberty to flout the standards upheld by “normies.” They want to do dirt on those standards, and indeed utterly to annihilate them. Nietzsche had their number in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
You preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful…
“What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge” – thus [the tarantulas] speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not” – thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy – perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers – erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge…
Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! … [W]hen they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had – power…
Preachers of equality and tarantulas… are sitting in their holes, these poisonous spiders, with their backs turned on life, they speak in favor of life, but only because they wish to hurt. They wish to hurt those who now have power. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 211-13)
Now, such hatred naturally has a tendency to subvert reason. But as Plato and Aquinas teach, it is sexual vice, among all vices, that has the greatest tendency to destroy rationality. Sexual desire can seriously cloud the intellect even in the best of circumstances, but when its objects are contra naturam, indulgence makes the very idea of an objective, natural order of things hateful. Wokeness, which marries the deadly sin of envy to that of lust, must inevitably give rise to ever more bizarre manifestations of outright irrationality.
So, affluence breeds softness which breeds egalitarianism which breeds licentiousness which breeds madness. This is all just good old fashioned sociopolitical analysis in the classical tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, et al.). And it is a very large part of the story we see playing out around us. But I submit that even this does not quite explain what Anton calls the “unprecedented” nature of our cultural collapse. What I have been describing are entirely natural processes of cultural decay. But there is something beyond the natural order at work here – something truly diabolical in what is going on.
After all, even the pagans of old had some significant understanding of the natural law. That is why the Church could find kindred spirits in the likes of Plato and Aristotle. By contrast, the modern West has largely lost even the moral knowledge that the pagans had. Deviancy was, in the days of the old paganism, largely confined to the affluent upper classes. Today it permeates the whole of the social order.
What happened between their time and ours? Christianity, of course – and then apostasyfrom Christianity. And it is this character of apostasy, I submit, that accounts for the unprecedented and diabolical character of the cultural collapse we are witnessing. The pagans of old had a rough understanding of the natural law. The Catholic faith perfected it, and added to it knowledge of our supernatural end – the beatific vision – and the possibility of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that allow us to achieve that end. But the modern West has abandoned the Faith, and lost, along with it, even the natural virtues, along with these supernatural gifts. The higher one has been raised, the further he has to fall. Or as Christ warns those who do not do well with what he has given them: “For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 13:12).
Now, where does liberalism fit into the story? Liberalism, I submit, was bound to give way to nihilism of the kind embodied in wokeness. As I have argued at length elsewhere, liberalism is essentially a Christian heresy, and its heresy involves a distortion of the Christian conception of nature. In particular, it requires a conception of nature that strips from it any inherent teleology or purpose, and thus yields a distorted conception of natural law. It also makes of the supernatural an alien imposition on nature rather than the completion of it. And as I have also argued, liberalism’s denuded conception of nature leaves the individualist self the sole arbiter of value. Whatever the self does not consent to must come to seem oppressive.
It is true that there is also, alongside its radical individualism, a strongly collectivist element in wokeness, particularly in Critical Race Theory. But this does not undermine the point that wokeness is the fruit of liberal individualism. For one thing, modern forms of collectivism (whether socialism, communism, or the racist collectivism of Nazism and CRT) have arisen precisely as an overreaction to liberal individualism. For another, the collectivism of CRT is highly attenuated by its emphasis on “intersectionality.” When one defines oneself as (say) an undocumented low-income trans lesbian plus-sized person of color with disabilities, who is the victim of oppression by everyone outside this intersection of categories, group identity isn’t doing much work anymore. It’s just another novel expression of individual grievance.
As Nietzsche emphasized, the egalitarianism of modern liberalism and socialism is an inheritance from Christianity, and lacks any rational basis in the absence of its original foundation. But modern forms of egalitarianism are also grotesque distortionsof what Christianity says about human equality. Christianity teaches that all human beings are equally made in God’s image by virtue of their rational nature, and have all been offered the supernatural end of the beatific vision. Wokeness says, contrary to traditional Christian teaching, that human beings are or ought to be equal in every significant respect and that all “inequities” per se are unjust. Christianity teaches that all sinners are equally offered the opportunity for forgiveness, if only they will repent. Wokeness teaches that no repentance is necessary because the things Christianity offers forgiveness for are not really sins. Indeed, the only real sinners are those who uphold the old norms.
In other ways too, wokeness amounts to a counterfeit Christianity that aims to subvert and replace the original. In particular, and as I have argued elsewhere, it has the character of a Manichean Gnostic cult that shares many traits with earlier Gnostic challenges to the Church.
Where will all of this lead? Contra those who worry (or hope) that the woke “successor ideology” will have its boot on our throats for generations, Anton says:
If forced to bet, I would have to place my chips somewhere between imminent collapse and drawn-out decline. I occasionally read theories of triple bank-shots and four-dimensional chess – they really know what they’re doing! – only to marvel. Our regime cannot, at present, unload a cargo ship, stock a store shelf, run a clean election, handle parental complaints at a school board meeting, pass a budget bill, treat a cold variant, keep order in the streets, defeat a third world country, or even evacuate said country cleanly. And that’s to say nothing of all the things it should be doing, that all non-joke countries do, that it refuses to do. If our ruling class has a plan, it would seem to be to destroy the society and institutions from which they, at present, are the largest – one is tempted to say only – beneficiaries. Do they think they can benefit more from the wreckage? Or are they driven by hatreds that blind them to self-interest? Perhaps they’re simply insane?
End quote. My own answer to Anton’s last three questions is “All of the above.” And I think that those who suppose that the current woke hegemony will last indefinitely are deluding themselves. The world is breathtakingly different from what it was even just five decades ago, when I was born. If norms that persisted for millennia can seemingly disintegrate in a single lifetime, why on earth does anyone have the confidence or fear that what has replaced them will last? Especially when it involves an attack on the very cell of society, the family, that is even more radical than what the communist regimes attempted?
In fact, this sick new disorder of things is so utterly contra naturam that it cannot possibly last. The real questions are: How chaotic will its end be? What comes after it? And might the successor to the successor ideology involve a revival of the Faith, apostasy from which has led us into this crisis?
Related reading:
The Gnostic heresy’s political successors
Tyranny of the sovereign individual
District Attorney Michel Foucault
Psychoanalyzing the sexual revolutionary
Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part I: Nietzsche
December 7, 2021
Dissident Philosophers
Rowman and Littlefield has just published the anthology
Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy
, edited by T. Allan Hillman and Tully Borland. (The hardcover version is expensive, but the publisher’s website indicates that there is also a cheaper eBook version.) My article “The Metaphysical Foundations of Conservatism” appears in the volume. The other contributors are Francis J. Beckwith, John Bickle, Marica Bernstein, Daniel Bonevac, Jason Brennan, Rafael De Clercq, Dan Demetriou, Michael Huemer, Eric Mack, J. P. Moreland, Jan Narveson, Michael Pakaluk, Neven Sesardić, Steven C. Skultety, William F. Vallicella, and Robert Westmoreland. In his blurb for the book, Prof. Thomas Kelly of Princeton University writes: “An interesting and at times fascinating glimpse into the thought of a group of heterodox intellectuals. In addition to the clear presentation of well-developed philosophical views that challenge left-wing orthodoxies, their personal experiences and reflections on what is involved in being a professional philosopher who dissents from those orthodoxies makes for compelling reading.”
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