Edward Feser's Blog, page 31

Do not abandon your Mother

In Catholic theology, the Church is not to be identified with a mere aggregate of her members, not even those members who happen to hold ecclesiastical office at any particular moment.  She is an institution which existed before any of her current membership did and will continue to exist when they are gone.  But more than that, she is a corporate person, who can be said to think and to will, and to have rights and duties and other personal characteristics.  Even more specifically, she is a person of a feminine nature, the Bride of Christ and the Holy Mother of the faithful, nourishing them through sacrament and doctrine in a way analogous to a human mother’s nourishing of her children.

For this reason, the character of the Church is not to be looked for in a snapshot of the members who exist in any particular generation, but rather in the attributes that persist through time.  In particular, her doctrine – the “mind of the Church” – is not to be found in the body of theological opinions that happen to prevail among laymen, theologians, priests, or bishops at some period of history.  Rather, it is to be found in the formal teaching of the Magisterium over time, both extraordinary (official definitive decrees of councils, popes, and the like) and ordinary (the consistent and constantly reiterated teaching of centuries which, simply by virtue of this consistency and reiteration, is authoritative even when not conveyed in conciliar decrees, ex cathedra statements, and the like).  Similarly, the holiness of the Church’s character is not necessarily to be found in the moral attributes that prevail among the membership or clergy of a particular generation.  Rather, it is to be found in her consistent tendency for two millennia to produce saints.

If a man suffers for weeks from a broken arm or a persistent flu, we don’t for that reason judge him to be generally of poor health.  Nor do we do so even if such conditions recur from time to time.  Someone of generally good health can suffer bouts of illness.  And in the same way, the Church’s indefectibility and holiness are not undermined by the fact that in some generations she is especially afflicted with members and leaders who are foolish, wicked, or otherwise fail their Mother and her divine Spouse.  The Church, as it is said, thinks in centuries.  And that is the scale at which she must be understood. 

Naturally, the skeptic will have all sorts of questions, but getting into the details about what sorts of errors are compatible with the Church’s claim to infallibility is not what this post is about.  I have addressed such matters elsewhere (see the links below). This post is primarily addressed to those who agree with, or at least sympathize with, the claims the Catholic Church makes about herself, but who are scandalized by the moral and theological crisis she is currently suffering through.  And it is occasioned by Rod Dreher’s recent comments on Catholic traditionalist writer Steve Skojec’s cri de coeur about the state of the Church.

Dreher famously left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy some years ago, after covering the clergy sexual abuse scandal as a journalist, and having understandably been appalled both by the evil perpetrated by the abusers and by the failure of the hierarchy properly to respond to it.  Skojec is appalled by this abuse as well, and also by the heterodoxy that has in recent years not only gone unchecked by the highest authorities in the Church, but been positively aided and abetted by some of them.  But he also bemoans the insularity, self-righteousness, ineffectiveness, and susceptibility to crackpot political ideas that he sees among too many of his fellow traditionalists.  And his article was occasioned by outrage at some shabby treatment he says his family has been subjected to at his traditionalist parish.  Skojec stops short of saying that he is going to leave the Church, but Dreher suggests that Skojec should consider following his own lead and switching to Eastern Orthodoxy.

I know nothing about the people Skojec accuses of spiritual abuse, and thus have no comment on the fairness of his charges or on his personal situation, other than to say that he is obviously suffering and I feel bad for him and wish him well.  And while traditionalist Catholics are in general unfairly maligned, it is of course true that there are crackpots and insular and self-righteous people among them (as there are within any group) and that the political and ecclesiastical crises of recent years have exacerbated this.  I also do not question Dreher’s sincerity, and it is clear to anyone who has read his work over the years that he suffered greatly from what he uncovered while reporting on the sexual abuse scandal.

Dreher’s dramatics

I do, however, question Dreher’s judgment, which is manifestly bad, and not an example for Skojec or anyone else to follow.  By his own admission, Dreher’s decision to leave the Church was driven by emotion rather than reason.  From what I can tell, he does not even claim to have any response to the arguments that once convinced him of the truth of Catholicism.  He talks instead about how his heart was broken by the evil done by the abusers, the hypocrisy and corruption of the hierarchy, and the self-deception of well-meaning fellow Catholics.  He talks about coming to see that his own commitment to Catholicism had been marred by pride and self-righteousness.  He tells us that to be a good Christian it is not enough to have good arguments and to follow the letter of the law.  He tells us that in the days before he left the Church he had become so filled with anger that it “blinded [him] to the good and holy things in the Catholic Church,” and that leaving for Orthodoxy provided a kind of release that led to a healthier spirituality.

Well, that’s all fair enough.  The trouble is that it simply does not in any way entail that the claims the Catholic Church makes are false, and Dreher knows it.  Again, he offers no counter-arguments in response to the arguments he once took to be compelling.  He also admits that exactly the same maladies that he saw when he was still a Catholic can afflict, and have afflicted, every other movement, organization, and church, including Eastern Orthodoxy.  Hence he essentially acknowledges that he has no rational basis whatsoever for what he did, but was led by an emotional response to his own personal situation. 

Like all people who act contrary to reason, Dreher tries to rationalize his doing so, with clichés about how we are creatures of emotion and not just intellect, how following rules and producing tidy arguments is not enough, etc.  Of course, this is all muddleheaded.  Dreher himself would not be impressed by this sort of rhetoric if it were offered by someone who disagreed with him.  For example, Dreher is a Christian, and one who embraces the traditional theological and moral teachings of the faith.  If someone rejected all of that on the basis of some bad experience or emotional crisis, and went on about how we are creatures of emotion, how rules are not enough, etc., Dreher would not take this to be a good reason to doubt the truth of Christianity.  He would say that he feels for such a person and does not judge him, but that ultimately such a person is simply mistaken.  What he does not seem to realize is that the same thing can be said about him.  Like someone who understandably but wrongly rejects Christianity because of painful personal experiences, Dreher has understandably but wrongly rejected Catholicism because of his own painful personal experiences. 

No doubt Dreher thinks there is more to it than that, but he explicitly declines to offer any rational grounds for thinking that there is more to it than that.  And when you start out by eschewing reason, you have by definition lost the argument.  Dreher would regard such a judgment as too coldly logical, but of course, that is precisely to double down on the mistake rather than to show that it is not a mistake.  Human beings are by nature rational creatures.  Yes, we are more than that, but the point is that we are not less than that.  Accordingly, though a sound worldview ought to satisfy our emotions, if it cannot also pass the test of rational justification, then of necessity it floats free from objective reality.  Dreher knows this, and rightly condemns subjectivism when he sees it in Critical Race Theory, transgender extremism, and other malign ideologies and movements.  He just doesn’t see it in himself.  This cognitive dissonance is why, despite eschewing reason, Dreher has for years been going on at length trying to justifyhis eschewal of reason, and therefore succeeds only in tying himself in knots. 

I don’t say this to condemn Dreher, who seems to be a good guy and whose writing I have enjoyed and profited from over the years.  But it must be said when he is trying to lead others into making the same mistake he made.

Providence’s timetable

It is easy for writers whose focus is on politics and current events to be too easily scandalized and impatient.  This is probably especially so of us Americans.  Our “shining city on a hill” idealism demands perfection in our institutions, leaders, and fellow citizens.  When we don’t get it, our “can do” mentality wants a solution to the problem and wants it now.  When satisfaction isn’t forthcoming, our “don’t tread on me” mentality threatens to throw the bums out when we can, and to pick up our marbles and go elsewhere when we cannot. 

Well, this is simply not how divine providence works, as scripture and Church history make clear.  Christ repeatedly warns us that we will face suffering, persecution, martyrdom, false teachers, and a degree of wickedness that will threaten to make our charity wax cold, and that this is part of the deal when we take up our cross and follow him.  Why are we surprised when it happens?  Do we suppose that he didn’t really mean it?

Skojec is scandalized by the fact that the confusion and heterodoxy fostered by Pope Francis’s many doctrinally problematic statements have not yet been remedied despite his having been in office for eight years.  This is quite ridiculous.  Eight years is nothing in terms of Church history.  The utter chaos introduced into the governance of the Church by Pope Stephen VI’s lunatic Cadaver Synod lasted for decades.  So did the chaos of the Great Western Schism.  Pope Honorius’s errors were not condemned until forty years after his death.  Further examples could easily be given.  Few people remember these events now, because things eventually worked themselves out so completely that they now look like blips.  If the world is still here centuries from now, Pope Francis’s chaotic reign will look the same way to Catholics of the future. 

Then, of course, there is the martyrdom which the earliest Christians suffered for centuries, which Christians of recent decades have suffered under communism and Islamism, and which countless Christians have suffered in the centuries in between.  Needless to say, this is worse than being treated shabbily by self-righteous fellow Catholics or being disappointed by feckless bishops.

In no way do I mean to mock Skojec’s or Dreher’s evident pain.  On the contrary, I feel for them.  But pain can blind us to reason and to our duty.  And it can blind us to the fact that we do not suffer it alone, that Christ permits us to undergo it only because he suffered it himself.  We need to put suffering into perspective, to unite it to Christ’s suffering, and to accept it in a spirit of penance and solidarity with others who suffer, especially those who suffer worse.  We need to keep in mind that, in the Church at large, Christ will set things right in his own good time.  And we need to focus on the fact that in that part of the Church over which each of us does have control – namely, the state of our own souls – we need endure only for the four score and ten that is the most that most of us have.

It’s personal

Dreher, Skojec, and others scandalized by the state of the Church may still find this too bloodless and impersonal.  Fair enough.  I return, then, to the point with which I began, which is that the Church is a personal institution.  When a Catholic abandons her, it is not like quitting a political party, or cancelling a subscription, or deciding no longer to use a company’s products.  It is more like breaking off a relationship with another human being.

But in fact it is worse even than that.  When a Catholic leaves the Church because he is scandalized by heresy, sexual abuse, and the like, this is like fleeing the scene when one’s mother is being attacked, lest one suffer harm oneself.  It is to abandon Holy Mother Church, the Bride of Christ, to the heretics and perverts, rather than to aid her against them and to suffer with her while they assail her. 

The matter couldn’t be less academic.  What is in question is no mere intellectual error.  It is a matter of personal loyalty or betrayal.  Or don’t we believe what Christ said about the nature of the Church for which he himself suffered and died?

Related reading:

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

Two popes and idolatry

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

Some comments on the open letter

Popes, heresy, and papal heresy

Why Archbishop Viganò is almost certainly telling the truth

Denial flows into the Tiber

The trouble with capitalism

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  (Matthew 19:24)

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?  (Mark 8:36)

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. (Matthew 4:4)

When people use or hear the word “capitalism,” some of the things they might bring to mind are:

1. The institution of private property, including private ownership of the basic means of production

2. Market competition

3. The existence of corporations as legal persons

4. Inequalities in wealth and income

5. An economic order primarily oriented to the private sector, with government acting at the margins and only where necessary

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of those things.  Indeed, some of them (such as private property and a government that respects subsidiarity) are required as a matter of natural law.   Eliminating all economic inequalities (as opposed to remedying poverty, which is a very different matter) is neither possible nor desirable.  The concept of the corporate person has long been recognized by, and regarded as salutary within, the natural law tradition (whatever one thinks about its instantiation in modern business corporations).  Socialism in the strict sense, which would centralize the most fundamental economic decision-making, is intrinsically evil.

On the other hand, other people using or hearing the term “capitalism” might have in mind things like:

6. A doctrinaire laissez-faire mentality that is reflexively hostile to all governmental economic intervention

7. The market as the dominant social institution, with an ethos of consumerism and commodification of everything as its sequel

8. Corporations so powerful that they are effectively unanswerable to government or public opinion

9. Doctrinaire minimalization or even elimination of social welfare institutions, even when there is no feasible private sector alternative

10. Globalization of a kind that entails dissolution of corporate and individual loyalties to the nation-state and local communities.

Now, all of these things are bad and should be opposed on natural law grounds.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely illustrative.  And what it illustrates is that it is unhelpful to talk about either embracing or rejecting capitalism full stop.  The term has too many connotations for that, and needs to be disambiguated.  Hence the sweeping claims often made by both sides in the debate over capitalism inevitably generate excessive heat while reducing light.  When people say “I support capitalism,” they often mean “I support 1-5” but their opponents hear them as saying “I support 6-10.”  And when people say “I oppose capitalism,” they often mean “I oppose 6-10,” but their opponents hear them as saying “I oppose 1-5.”  To a large extent, they talk past each other.

When we do disambiguate the term, we get more light and less heat.  But we also lose the simpleminded pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist slogans.  No doubt that is precisely why friends and critics of capitalism alike prefer not to disambiguate it. 

Does this entail that no interesting general claims can be made about actually existing capitalism (as opposed to the abstract models of capitalism put forward by its defenders and its critics)?  Not at all.  Having pleaded for nuance, let me now boldly make some sweeping claims of my own.  I can at least promise that I will offend both sides.  Here are the claims:

I. Capitalism has made us materially much better off.

II. Capitalism has made us spiritually much worse off.

In defense of the first claim, I would simply refer to the standard arguments made by libertarians, free market conservatives, and liberals like Steven Pinker, which I regard as unanswerable.  The rule of law, stable property rights, the price mechanism, the division of labor, and other aspects of modern market economies have made possible astounding wealth creation and technological advances that have raised the material conditions of everyone.  As Pinker writes:

Together, technology and globalization have transformed what it means to be a poor person, at least in developed countries.  The old stereotype of poverty was an emaciated pauper in rags.  Today, the poor are likely to be as overweight as their employers, and dressed in the same fleece, sneakers, and jeans.  The poor used to be called the have-nots.  In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.  (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)  Almost half of the households below the poverty line had a dishwasher, 60 percent had a computer, around two-thirds had a washing machine and a clothes dryer, and more than 80 percent had an air conditioner, a video recorder, and a cell phone.  In the golden age of economic equality in which I grew up, middle-class “haves” had few or none of these things.  (Enlightenment Now, p. 117)

Before you respond that government had something to do with this as well, let me emphasize that I don’t disagree with that.  Again, I am not talking about the laissez-fairefantasy capitalism of libertarian dreams and socialist nightmares.  I am talking about actually existing capitalism, which has always had a significant public sector component – government provision of basic infrastructure, military research and development vis-à-vis technology, redistributive programs, and all the rest.  The point, though, is that it was precisely the governments of capitalist countries that oversaw these advances, because they protected and supplemented the overall capitalist order rather than subverted it.  Even redistributed golden eggs have first to be laid by the market economy goose. 

But affluence can have a high spiritual cost, as classical philosophy and Christian theology alike teach us.  Modern capitalist society is essentially an instance of what Plato called the oligarchic sort of regime, which he regarded as the third-worst sort – or third-best, if you want to accentuate the positive.  It is better than democracy and tyranny, but worse than either the rule of the Philosopher-Kings or what Plato called timocracy. 

Now, keep in mind that the way Plato characterizes the five sorts of regime that he distinguishes is primarily by way of the kinds of souls which predominate in them, and that the characterization thus presupposes his tripartite conception of human nature (in terms of reason, the spirited part of the soul, and appetite).  A society governed by the Philosopher-Kings is one in which the highest part of the soul, reason, is idealized and is dominant in those who govern.  A timocracy is a society in which the spirited part of the soul, and the martial virtues that characterize it, is dominant in those who govern it.  A democracy, as Plato characterizes it, is a society in which the lowest, appetitive part of the soul dominates and tends toward licentiousness.  A tyranny is what results when a particularly ruthless democratic soul imposes its will on the rest. 

Oligarchy as Plato conceives of it stands between timocracy and democracy.  Like democracy, it is governed by the appetitive part of the soul.  But the specific appetite it fosters, the desire to acquire wealth, is not as unruly or chaotic as the pursuit of sensual pleasure that dominates democratic society.  Its satisfaction requires some degree of self-discipline and delay of gratification – and thus the bourgeois virtues, which, though not as noble as those honored in the two higher sorts of regime, at least put some restraints on the other appetites.

The trouble is that, for one thing, later generations within an oligarchy, who enjoy the benefits of affluence without having had to exercise the discipline required in order to create it, tend to become soft and decadent.  And for another thing, there is money to be made in catering to the lower appetites.  Hence oligarchy tends to decay into democracy in Plato’s sense.  And that is why the America of the robber barons and of the military-industrial complex eventually gave way to the America of Woodstock and the sexual revolution, and now to that grisly amalgam of the two – the America of contemporary woke capitalism. 

If easy affluence is corruptive of the natural virtues, it is even more corruptive of the supernatural virtues.  The rich young man, though he showed initial interest in following Christ, opted instead to hold on to his possessions when he had to make a choice (Matthew 16: 19-22).  This famously led Christ to warn that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). 

Now, superficial readers of this passage suppose that it is fundamentally about the duty of material assistance to the poor.  They overlook the reaction to Jesus’s teaching:  “When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, ‘Who then can be saved?’” (Matthew 19:25).  Why would they ask such a thing, since only a minority of people are rich?  St. Augustine answered as follows:

When the Lord says that a rich man does not enter the kingdom of heaven, his disciples ask him who can be saved.  Since the rich are so few in comparison with the poor, we must understand, then, that those who yearn for such material goods must realize that they are included in the number of those rich. (Questions on the Gospels)

Or as Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.”  The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ.  And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are notrich, but who cannot bear the fact.  Indeed, they can be in even worseshape if they add to this sin of avarice the sin of envy. 

But it is a commonplace that those who suffer want of any kind are more likely to perceive their dependence on and need for God, whereas those who have much can become self-satisfied and distracted by worldly concerns.  In particular, they are in danger not only of the sins people usually associate with wealth – avarice, gluttony, and pride – but of the even more insidious sin of acediaor distraction from the highest, spiritual goods.  Hence the rich stand in special need of warning.  How many more are bound to be in this spiritual danger, then, when many more are affluent – as they are in modern capitalist societies?

That Plato’s and Christ’s warnings have been borne out is obvious from the collapse of traditional morality and widespread apostasy from Christianity that have characterized modern capitalist societies, and from the way of life that has replaced them.  In such societies, “success” is conceived of in terms of the acquisition of material wealth.  Preparing the young for adulthood is conceived of in terms of training them for a “career” that will assure them this “success.”  Pursuit of this goal is the preoccupation not just of an elite, but of everyone – achieving it is the “American dream.”  Social justice is conceived of primarily in terms of enabling as many as possible to achieve this “dream.”

Everyday life is devoted to making money that one might spend on dining, entertainments, travel, and other material goods – which enable one to rest up so as to be ready to get back to making money.  Advertising is ubiquitous, and consumers dutifully pursue the latest new product, the latest pop culture fad, the latest fashions, or the latest enthusiasm in cuisine.  Though political fights may arise over various cultural and moral controversies, in the end it is the state of the economy that tends to determine who gets into power.  Even conservative parties tend to cave in on “social issues” but will fight tooth and nail for tax cuts, deregulation, and the like.  “It’s the economy, stupid!” is the bipartisan conventional wisdom. 

Even otherwise traditionally-minded Christians become suckers for obscene materialistic distortions of the faith, such as the “prosperity gospel.”  Liberal Christians, meanwhile, emphasize helping the poor and marginalized – not to save their souls, but rather to get them into the same rat race that the rest of society runs in.  Christ says: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).  But secularists and modern Christians alike, whether conservative or liberal, take the highest end of moral and political endeavor to be to build a world where no one ever has to deny himself anything and there are no crosses of any kind.

From a traditional Christian point of view, then, the main danger of actually existing capitalism is not that it makes people poor, but on the contrary that it makes them richcompared to most people who have ever lived, and certainly fixates them on the acquisition of material wealth.  It has thereby led the mass of mankind into a particularly insidious sort of temptation that relatively fewer were faced with in previous ages.  Most people read passages like Matthew 19:24 and smugly think of the rich as “them.”  But to paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met the rich man, and he is us.

Is the solution to abolish riches?  No, because wealth is not intrinsically bad, and indeed is a positive good.  Again, the problem is not riches per se, but the fixation on riches.  And the fixation can exist even when riches do not.  The solution is to counter this fixation.  Sound principles by which this might be done were set out by popes Leo XIII,  Pius XI, and John Paul II, who condemned socialism in absolute terms, but defended capitalist institutions only with significant qualifications of a kind that no libertarian or classical liberal could accept – and who insisted that both the crisis of modernity and the social transformation needed to remedy it are fundamentally moral and religious rather than economic in nature.

Related reading:

Hayek’s tragic capitalism

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

Aquinas contra globalism

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

Intellectuals in hell

It is by virtue of our rational or intellectualpowers that we are made in God’s image and have a dignity nothing else in the material world possesses.  As Aquinas writes:

Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. vi, 12): “Man's excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field.” Therefore things without intellect are not made to God's image…  It is clear, therefore, that intellectual creatures alone, properly speaking, are made to God's image.  (Summa Theologiae I.93.2)

And again, a couple of articles later: “Man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature” (Summa TheologiaeI.93.4).

You might at first think, then, that intellectualsin the modern sense of the term would be the most Godlike of human beings, and the most likely to achieve salvation.  Not so.  Indeed, if anything, scripture (with which, naturally, Aquinas agrees) implies the opposite.  We read, for example:

For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart” … God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.  (1 Corinthians 1:19, 27)

and:

I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes. (Matthew 11:25)

Moreover, angels, being pure intellects entirely independent of matter, are in that respect even more like God than we are, and certainly more intelligent.  And yet the greatest of these angelic intellects, Lucifer, fell from grace and took many other angels with him.   Obviously, then, those of very great intellect can be and often are lost, whereas those of weak intellects can be and often are saved.  To quote I, Claudius: “Evidently, quality of wits is more important than quantity.”

But what exactly makes for quality of wits in this context?  Recall first the Thomistic thesis that will follows upon intellect, so that anything with an intellect also has a will.  Recall too that, like everything else in nature, the intellect and will have final causes that determine what makes for a good or bad specimen of the kind.  The intellect is naturally directed toward knowledge of truth, and the will is naturally directed toward pursuit of what is good.  But truths and goods are hierarchical, with some more important than others.  A good intellect is one focused on the highest of truths and a good will is one set on the highest of goods.  Naturally, then, an intellect is deficient to the extent that it is in error or its attention is distracted by lesser truths, and a will is deficient to the extent that it fails to pursue what is good or aims at what is in fact evil.

With that in mind, let’s look at what Aquinas immediately goes on to say in the passage from Summa Theologiae I.93.4quoted above:

Since man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature.  Now the intellectual nature imitates God chiefly in this, that God understands and loves Himself.  Wherefore we see that the image of God is in man in three ways.

First, inasmuch as man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men.

Secondly, inasmuch as man actually and habitually knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace.

Thirdly, inasmuch as man knows and loves God perfectly; and this image consists in the likeness of glory. Wherefore on the words, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us” (Psalm 4:7), the gloss distinguishes a threefold image of “creation,” of “re-creation,” and of “likeness.” The first is found in all men, the second only in the just, the third only in the blessed.

End quote.  Our intellectual nature is fulfilled, then, in knowing and loving God above all things.  For since God is the First Cause and thus ultimate explanation of all things, only knowledge of God can fulfill the intellect, and since he is the Last End or highest good, only he can satisfy the will.  Hence, to the extent that an intellect or will is directed away fromthe true or the good, and especially to the extent that they are directed away from God, they are corrupt and directed away from salvation.

But how could that happen in an intellect that is powerful?  How could it fall into such grave error?  The fundamental way it can happen is if the will is misdirected.  For when that occurs, an intellect is less likely to arrive at truth, and likely instead to seek out rationalizations for the evil it has fallen in love with.  This is one reason why intellectuals may actually be more likely to be damned than less intelligent people.  Having more powerful intellects, they are better able to spin clever sophistries by which they can blind themselves to the truth. 

Demonstrating things like God’s existence or the natural law foundations of traditional morality is not, after all, that hard.  What is difficult is cutting through the enormous tangle of sophistries by which modern thinkers have obscured our view of what was clear enough to intellects like those of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the like.  You have to deny vast swaths of common sense (concerning matters like causality and teleology, for example) in order to get skepticism about these things off the ground.  Less intelligent and well-educated people find it harder to do that, which is why they are less likely to reject traditional morality and religion.  It takes a high degree of intelligence to develop narratives and theories that not only defy common sense, but make it seem reasonable to do so.

Powerful intellects are much less likely to become corrupted to the extent that their view of things falls within what is sometimes called the Ur-Platonist family of philosophical positions.  And they are very likely to become corrupted to the extent that they depart from this family – say, by being drawn to materialism, or mechanism, or nominalism, or relativism, or skepticism.  Or worse, to several or all of these.  Now, a great many modern intellects have fallen into precisely these errors.  Moreover, these errors have in turn led them into grave sexual immorality, and as Plato and Aquinas warn us, disordered sexuality has of all vices the greatest tendency to darken the intellect.  Sophistry and rationalization lead to the indulgence of disordered desire, which leads to further and ever more bizarre rationalizations, which leads in turn to further and even deeper disorders of desire, and so on, in a kind of death spiral of the soul.  Lost in sensuality, a powerful intellect can then become lost in theory, unable to see beyond it to reality and no longer wanting to.  This is why St. Paul, in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, links the intellectual errors of the pagans to their sexual depravity.  And we are seeing the same sort of thing all around us at the present time, with unparalleled depravity rationalized by sophistries so transparent and laughable that few would have been fooled by them for a moment as recently as a decade or two ago. 

An old proverb has it that “the corruption of the best is the worst.”  Hence Plato regarded the monarchy of the Platonic Philosopher-King as the best form of government, but tyranny, which is the corruption of monarchy, as the worst form.  Now, the intellect is, as it were, the monarch of the soul.  When the intellect is guided by sound principles, the soul is governed in a way analogous to rule by a Philosopher-King.  But when the intellect is in thrall to sophistries and rationalizations of disordered desire, it governs the soul like a tyrant, and destroys it as surely as a tyrant destroys a polity.

But though intellectuals can be tempted by sins of the flesh like anyone else, that isn’t really their Achilles’ heel qua intellectuals.  You need to look elsewhere among the Seven Deadly Sins for that.  And once again, the example of the angels is instructive.  Of their fall, Aquinas writes:

But there can be no sin when anyone is incited to good of the spiritual order; unless in such affection the rule of the superior be not kept.  Such is precisely the sin of pride – not to be subject to a superior when subjection is due.  Consequently the first sin of the angel can be none other than pride.

Yet, as a consequence, it was possible for envy also to be in them, since for the appetite to tend to the desire of something involves on its part resistance to anything contrary.  Now the envious man repines over the good possessed by another, inasmuch as he deems his neighbor's good to be a hindrance to his own.  But another's good could not be deemed a hindrance to the good coveted by the wicked angel, except inasmuch as he coveted a singular excellence, which would cease to be singular because of the excellence of some other.  So, after the sin of pride, there followed the evil of envy in the sinning angel, whereby he grieved over man's good, and also over the Divine excellence, according as against the devil's will God makes use of man for the Divine glory.  (Summa Theologiae I.63.2)

The intellect is the highest part of our nature.  It is not surprising, then, that those with especially powerful intellects would see themselves as the highest human beings, and be strongly tempted to the sin of pride.  This is part of what makes the sophistries of modern philosophy, modern politics, and modern culture in general so extremely attractive to intellectuals.  For these ideas are often both difficult to understand and contrary to common sense – and, for these reasons, contrary to what the average person believes.  To accept these sophistries is, accordingly, a way to reinforce one’s sense of superiority over the mass of mankind.  The prideful intellect is tempted by the thought that if hoi polloi believe it, then it mustbe wrong.

To accept instead views that uphold common sense and the opinions of the average person (as, in their different ways, Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics and conservative political philosophy tend to do) would be to credit the opinions of unsophisticated people in a way that makes it harder for the intellectual to feel superior to them.  And this, I would suggest, is the deep reason why modern intellectuals tend to have the political biases they do.

Now, the sin of envy, as Aquinas indicates, is the sequel to this sin of pride.  Why are so many intellectuals seemingly hell-bent on trying to shatter ordinary people’s belief in God, free will, morality, and the like?  Here’s one possible reason.  People who believe in these things tend to be happier than those who do not.  If you are someone who sees yourself as superior to such people, you are bound to be tempted to resent their happiness and to be pleased at the thought of destroying what you take to be the illusions that generate it.  And being pained at the good of another so that one desires to see it destroyed is envy.

Hence, it is difficult for an intellectual to enter the kingdom of heaven for the same reason it is difficult for a rich man to enter.  It has nothing to do with intellect or riches being bad in themselves.  On the contrary, they are good.  Rather, it has to do with the strong temptations to which these good things give rise – prideful self-sufficiency and contempt for those who do not have the same gifts (whether smarts or money). 

Those who fail to repent of such sins are doomed forever to be schooled in the error of their ways.  But in this school there are no final exams, no graduation, and no degrees.  Though there is most certainly tenure.

Grisez on balancing health against other considerations

Now that millions have been vaccinated, bogeyman Donald Trump has departed, and life is starting to get back to normal, some people are getting some critical distance on the health crisis of the last year – which was caused by the reaction to the virus no less than the virus itself.  Liberal magazine The Atlantic criticizes “the liberals who can’t quit lockdown.”  On Real Time, Bill Maher challenges his fellow left-wingers to own up to their exaggerations and misinformation on the subject of COVID-19.  On Daily Clout, feminist Naomi Wolf interviews Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who says that the lockdowns were “biggest public health mistake we've ever made” and caused harms “worse than COVID.”

The disaster had several sources.  There was politics, which poisons nearly everything today.  There was the cult of expertise, whose members believe that rational thinking is essentially a matter of shrieking “Science!” in the face of anyone who disagrees with you.  But there was also the paradoxical fact that sometimes the worst thing you can do when dealing with a crisis is to fixate on it.  A wise man sees a problem, but a fanatic sees onlythe problem.  

The philosopher James Ross once characterized a fellow philosopher’s needlessly technical and ineffective argument as analogous to dropping an atom bomb in order to try to kill an ant, and missing.  I wouldn’t say that COVID-19 is like an ant, exactly, but it is certainly far less lethal than people feared a year ago.  And locking down vast populations of healthy people in order to deal with it has certainly turned out to be like dropping an atom bomb and missing, causing enormous damage to people’s livelihoods and mental health and to children’s education, with no evidence that it produced any good effects that could not have been achieved in a less extreme way.  Meanwhile, those who urged caution were shrilly dismissed as “grandma killers,” as putting the economy before lives, etc.  This is the voice of a fanaticism that refuses to see anything but the problem.

The Catholic “new natural law” moral theologian Germain Grisez can hardly be accused of putting insufficient value on human life.  He not only thought that it is morally better in practice never to use capital punishment (a view that a Catholic is at liberty to take), but that capital punishment is always and intrinsically evil, wrong even in principle (a view that is heterodox, as Joe Bessette and I have shown).  He thought that, given its health risks, the regular smoking of tobacco is gravely sinful, a view that in my opinion is too extreme.  (See pp. 600-603 of volume 3 of Grisez’s The Way of the Lord Jesus.)

At the same time, even Grisez was clear that it is a mistake to emphasize life and health to the point that other important goods are undermined.  Here he is perfectly in line with traditional natural law reasoning and Catholic moral theology.  Certain actions are ruled out as absolutely forbidden (such as the direct and intentional killing of the innocent in abortion and euthanasia) and others are absolutely required (such as providing the ordinary means of survival to the ill, like food and water).  But there is a wide range of treatments and policies which, though they might be conducive to health and the preservation of life, have to be balanced against other goods, so that they cannot be absolutely required.  Whether or not to make use of them is a matter of prudential judgment, about which people of good will can reasonably disagree.

In Volume 2 of The Way of the Lord Jesus(specifically, in Question Fof Chapter 8), Grisez sets out some important relevant principles.  First he warns that our notion of health “should not be expanded to include total human well-being” (p. 520).  There is a tendency among some to include just any old thing that is somehow conducive to our well-being as a matter of “health,” and thus to fall within the purview of “public health.”  This is sophistry, conceptually sloppy and prone to encourage demagoguery.

A similar semantic sloppiness can be seen in the use to which many left-of-center Catholics now put the expression “pro-life.”  This expression has no Catholic doctrinal or theological significance at all.  It is merely a political slogan that is historically associated with right-of-center opposition to abortion.  But some have seen fit to deploy the rhetorical trick of defining “life” so broadly that anything that might be in some way arguably be conducive to health and well-being – government provision of health care, liberalized immigration laws, “safer at home” policies, etc. – is characterized as “pro-life.”  The next move is to insist that anyone who claims to be “pro-life” but opposes socialized medicine, open borders, lockdowns, etc. is a hypocrite and perhaps even a dissenter from Catholic teaching.

The sophistry here is effective to the extent that it is precisely because it is so shameless.  The differences between the traditional concerns of “pro-lifers” and current left-wing enthusiasms are both obvious and more important than any similarities.  Abortion and euthanasia are intrinsically evil, wrong regardless of circumstances.  By contrast, how best to fund health care, how many immigrants to allow into a country and under what conditions, how best to deal with a pandemic, etc. are matters of prudential judgment that have to balance a variety of relevant moral principles and concrete circumstances, so that people of good will can reasonably disagree about specific policies.   Papering over these crucial differences by appropriating the political slogan “pro-life” and flinging it back at one’s opponents has exactly zero doctrinal or theological force.  You might as well use this stupid rhetorical trick to argue that since Catholics are “pro-life,” they should be vegetarians, or should convert to Jainism. 

Anyway, when, as Grisez advises, we use “health” and related words with precision rather than merely as rhetorical cudgels, it is clear that it is a fallacy to suppose that shouting such words ought to stop all debate about whether lockdowns are a good idea.

Grisez also points out that a tendency to let considerations about health trump everything else can reflect a worldly mindset rather than a Christian one.  He writes:

Choices concerning health should take other goods into account.  Partly because health is an aspect of the basic good of life and a means to other goods, but also partly because many people excessively fear death and greatly esteem health care technology, people in affluent nations sometimes tend to think of health as if it were the most important value.  As a result, they assume that other goods must yield to health’s paramount claims, and so deliberate and make choices regarding health without duly considering their other responsibilities.  Important as it is, however, health is only one good among others, and Christians should harmonize choices concerning health with other elements of their personal vocations.  This seldom means that health should be neglected entirely, but it often demands that the means used to protect and promote health be selected and limited to avoid interfering with other areas of life. (p. 521)

What other areas would those be?  Summarizing Catholic teaching about how to decide whether or not to resort to extraordinary means in order to prolong life, Grisez writes:

The burdens of health care can provide an adequate reason to forgo it.  Life is like other basic human goods: it does not override every other good, nor does it always deserve preference.  There always are reasons not to do something that would protect life or promote health, since health care always involves burdens.  Hence, sound judgment requires identifying both the prospective benefits and burdens of possible forms of care.  In this matter, the Holy See teaches:

It is also permissible to make do with the normal means that medicine can offer.  Therefore one cannot impose on anyone the obligation to have recourse to a technique which is already in use but which carries a risk or is burdensome.  Such a refusal is not the equivalent of suicide; on the contrary, it should be considered as an acceptance of the human condition, or a wish to avoid the application of a medical procedure disproportionate to the results that can be expected, or a desire not to impose excessive expense on the family or the community. [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,Declaration on Euthanasia]

Therefore, burdens that attach to the care itself can provide adequate reasons to forgo it.  These burdens can be grouped in three categories:

i) Care imposes economic costs and utilizes facilities and services which usually could be put to other good uses.

ii) Many things which can be done for the sake of health also can have bad side effects for health itself.  Surgery always carries some risks of death and/or disability; medications often interfere with various functions.  Examinations and treatments often are painful, and pain can interfere with good functioning, especially at the psychic level.

iii) Many things which can be done for the sake of health have bad side effects for other human goods.  They may restrict one’s inner life and activity, prevent one from moving about freely, isolate one from family and associates, and so on. (pp. 526-27)

Notice that considerations about economic costs, psychological costs, loss of freedom of movement, isolation from family and others, and the like are among the things that Catholic teaching says can override whatever benefits to life and health a treatment might be thought to have.  But these are exactly the sorts of considerations that critics of the lockdowns appealed to.  It is outrageous and demagogic, then, for any Catholic to pretend that those among his fellows who opposed the lockdowns were ipso facto disloyal or insufficiently “pro-life.” 

Because of his fidelity to the Magisterium, Grisez is often associated with the “right,” but where some matters of life and health are concerned (such as his views on capital punishment and smoking) he was decidedly to the “left.”  Hence his position on the real but limited value of considerations about health cannot easily be dismissed by left-of-center Catholics.  In any event, in this case he was not merely presenting his own opinion, but the teaching of the Church and of the broader natural law tradition.

Related posts:

Preventive war and quarantining the healthy

Lockdowns versus social justice

The rule of lawlessness

The experts have no one to blame but themselves

What “the science” is saying this week

The lockdown is no longer morally justifiable

The lockdown and appeals to authority

The burden of proof is on those who impose burdens

The lockdown’s loyal opposition

Some thoughts on the COVID-19 crisis

The idols of the mind

Thomas Harper is one of the great forgotten Neo-Scholastic writers of the nineteenth century.  I discussed his wonderful little book The Immaculate Conception in a blog post many years ago.  He is especially notable for his unusually rigorous and thorough treatment of abstract topics in metaphysics, in works such as the massive three-volume The Metaphysics of the School.  Harper will sometimes interrupt a sustained exercise in abstract reasoning with a non-technical aside, as he does in the course of discussing the metaphysics of truth in Volume I.  He there offers (at pp. 461-466) a commentary on Francis Bacon’s “idols of the mind” which is even more relevant now than it was in Harper’s day.

The idols of the mind are four persistent sources of error which Bacon took to stand in the way of intellectual progress.  He discusses them in The New Organon and labels them the idols of the tribe, the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, and the idols of the theatre.  The idols of the tribe are biases resulting from the limits of human nature, such as our tendency to be fooled by the surface appearances of things.  The idols of the cave are biases deriving from an individual’s temperament, experiences, education, etc.  The idols of the marketplace are biases stemming from the habitual ways of describing and conceptualizing things that we pick up from our social context.  The idols of the theatre are biases deriving from unexamined philosophical assumptions.  Harper elaborates on each of these, especially the second and third, in illuminating ways.

Idols of the tribe and the theatre

It is somewhat ironic that an unreconstructed Scholastic like Harper should treat Bacon’s account in a sympathetic way, given that the Scholasticism of Bacon’s own day was one of Bacon’s targets.  But then, it is typical of a good Scholastic to look for whatever truth there is to be found in a view, and Bacon’s general points are well taken even if one can disagree with his application of them to certain specific cases.

As I discussed in an earlier post, in their own elaboration on the idols of the tribe, Bacon and his early modern successors took what a Scholastic is bound to regard as an excessively skeptical view of the deliverances of perceptual experience.  But Harper does not discuss this issue.  In his own treatment of the errors deriving from the limits of human nature, he emphasizes instead the Aristotelian theme that though the human intellect can arrive at knowledge of universal natures, it must (unlike angelic intellects, which are entirely separated from matter) abstract them from particulars known through the sense organs.  This opens the door to all the sorts of intellectual mistakes that might result from the incompleteness and admixture of error to which perceptual knowledge is prone (even if the Aristotelian will not agree with early modern proponents of the primary versus secondary quality distinction about the specific waysin which perception can lead us into error).

In his treatment of the idols of the theatre, Harper identifies idealism and materialismas the two main philosophical errors to which thinkers in the nineteenth century were prone.  Naturally, your mileage may vary, but Harper (like yours truly) is looking at things from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view.  And from that point of view, as Harper points out, idealism tends to overemphasize the abstract and speculative and materialism tends to overemphasize the concrete and practical.  The metaphysical implications of each tendency are, of course, that idealism absorbs all reality up into mind and materialism drags all reality down into matter.

I would submit that postmodernism and scientism in their various guises are the contemporary heirs to the two tendencies Harper identifies, and degenerate heirs at that.  Postmodernist views essentially absorb all reality into the contingent cultural and linguistic products of the human mind, specifically – a far cry from, say, the Absolute Spirit of Hegel.  And the scientism of contemporary celebrity scientists and New Atheist types is, as I have chronicled on this blog over the years, philosophically so shallow that it makes even the materialism of Marx look sophisticated by comparison.

Anyway, Harper does not say more about the idols of the tribe and those of the theatre – which are, respectively, the most concrete and most abstract of the sources of error.  His focus is on the other two, middle ground, idols.

Idols of the cave

Of the idols that reflect individual temperament and formation, Harper identifies two as of special interest.  The first he labels with the wonderful old-fashioned and forgotten term “viewiness.”  The viewy personality type is that of someone overly impressed with an idea because it is original, bold, or paradoxical, even if it is half-baked at best.  Such a person is intellectually lazy and superficial, unwilling to examine the idea critically and rigorously and to consider how it might need to be refined or even faces serious difficulties.  The fanciful idea instead becomes the lens through which everything is viewed.  As Harper writes, such people “do not master their idea; the idea masters them” (p. 462).  The “viewy” sort of thinker, Harper says, is inevitably interesting but also unsafe as a guide.

When one considers currently fashionable claims to the effect that there are dozens of “genders,” that the police should be “defunded,” that “white supremacy” lurks under every bed and around every corner, and other harebrained ideas light on evidence or argumentation but put forward with maximum dogmatism and shrill intolerance, it is evident that “viewiness” has in recent years reached pandemic proportions. 

The other idol of the cave discussed by Harper represents an extreme opposite from that of viewiness.  It is associated with the personality type who is immersed in minutiae, endlessly cataloguing a variety of particular facts but unwilling to rise to a unifying systematic view of the whole.  Those familiar with the history of philosophy during the last century or so will recognize “viewiness” to be the occupational hazard of continental philosophy (which is the ultimate source of so many of the bad ideas associated with the “Critical Social Justice” movement).  And they will recognize the inability to rise above minutiae to be the occupational hazard of analytic philosophy. 

(This is, of course, an oversimplification.  Continental philosophy is the source of many deep insights about particular phenomena closely observed – for example, Husserl on perception and Merleau-Ponty on embodiment.  And analytic philosophers can be guilty of viewiness, the philosophical naturalism uncritically assumed by so many of them being the prime example.  But then, I am not saying that all continental or analytic philosophers are actually guilty of the sins in question.  The point is merely to note errors to which each approach is prone if one is not careful.)

Idols of the marketplace

It is the sources of error deriving from the manner in which ideas are propagated in the public square that Harper has the most to say about.  He identifies no less than seven distinct varieties.  The first he calls “passivity of thought,” which is the tendency to treat mass media (newspapers, pamphlets, and the like being the examples he had in mind) as consumer goods that one might choose to serve as the providers of one’s stock of information and range of possible opinions.  To use a modern term for what Harper has in mind, the consumer essentially “outsources” his thinking and thereby becomes prey to whatever sophistry or partisanship determines the content of his favored source of ideas.  The contemporary relevance is obvious.  The far greater diversity today of types of mass media, and the rise of social media, have made it even easier now than it was in Harper’s day for people to confine themselves to echo chambers (or indeed to sub-chambers within echo chambers) of either a left-wing or right-wing kind.

The second source of error is what Harper calls “the critical temper.”  This is the kind of mentality that is reflexively hostile to the inheritance of the past.  As Harper points out, this mindset has infected Western thought since the rise of early modern philosophy, and it has permeated our culture much more deeply in the near century-and-a-half since he wrote.  It is evident in the Marxian and Foucauldian “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in popular culture’s relentless celebration of the rebel and the innovator, in moronic slogans like “think different,” and in the kneejerk tendency to dismiss traditional moral attitudes as mere “bigotry” or otherwise to presume them guilty until proven innocent.  (The correct attitude, as every Aristotelian natural law theorist and Burkean conservative knows, is to presume them innocent until proven guilty.  Notice that, contrary to a common caricature, that does not entail that they never are guilty.  The issue has to do with where the burden of proof lies.)

The third modern idol of the marketplace identified by Harper is what he calls the “unreality of thought.”  What he has in mind is an attitude that makes of intellectual life a kind of mental onanism, where things are puzzled over simply for the sake of doing so, rather than for the sake of discovering reality.  As Harper writes, with thinkers of this mindset, “in their judgment, all the value is in the search; not in the discovery” (p. 464).  This is echoed in the stupid contemporary slogan “It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.”  In fact, of course, the search or journey is literally pointless without a destination.  And as Harper notes, this mentality tends to blind one to the reality, or at least the knowability, of truth.  (I would suggest that the prevalence of this attitude toward the life of the mind is one of the many incoherencies to which the modern neglect of final causality has led us.  For the intellect has a natural end no less than our other faculties do, and it is precisely the attainment of truth.)

A fourth and related source of error is the neglect of what Harper calls “the responsibility of thought.”  Here he is thinking of the presumption that everyone is morally at liberty to express whatever views he wants to, no matter how poorly thought out and potentially damaging to society.  It is the attitude of demanding the right to expression without recognizing the duties that go along with rights – in this case, the duty carefully to think through the implications and defensibility of one’s opinions before giving expression to them. 

Note that the problem here is distinct from, even if related to, the question of how extensive the legal right to express one’s views ought to be.  Naturally, the idea of putting limitations on that right raises problems that I am not addressing here.  The point is that, even someone who favors a nearly unrestricted legal right to free speech ought to see the reality of the problem Harper is calling attention to.  Favoring free expression without concerning oneself about the quality of what is expressed makes no more sense than favoring eating without concerning oneself about the quality of the food eaten.  The exchange of ideas, like the consumption of food, has a teleology that determines its proper use.

A fifth idol of the marketplace is “literary venality.”  Here Harper has in mind the tendency for writers and thinkers to be guided by considerations of commercial gain or partisan advantage rather than the disinterested pursuit of truth.  This is, of course, just old fashioned sophistry, which is a potential problem in any society and for any political persuasion.  But as Plato taught, it is something to which democracies are especially prone. 

The sixth of the idols falling into the present category, says Harper, is “aversion… [to] the abstract and difficult.”  This is the attitude of the person who sees himself as practical and down-to-earth and who lacks patience for what he regards as the hair-splitting of metaphysicians.  Now, some of the examples of bad thinking that I have cited so far have been left-wing.  But Harper notes that in modern times, a philistine aversion to abstract and difficult reasoning stems in part from “the materialism engendered by our devotion to trade and commerce” (p. 465).  Hence it has what today would widely be regarded as a “right-wing” provenance, and people strongly drawn to business and money-making do indeed often lack sufficient interest in or appreciation for abstract philosophical matters.

The seventh and last idol of the marketplace is what Harper calls “neglect of moral preparation.”  In particular, it is the failure to subordinate appetite to reason, so that the latter does not become the servant of the former.  This is perhaps Harper’s most important insight, even though – or rather, I should say, precisely because – it is the one to which contemporary readers are bound to be most resistant.  From Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas, ancient and medieval thinkers knew that excessive love of pleasure is corrosive of rationality.  They would agree with Harper’s judgement that “it is impossible for a man who is the slave of his passions to be a true philosopher” (p. 465).

That even the mildest disagreement with the ever more expansive agenda of the sexual revolution is now routinely met, not with dispassionate argumentation, but instead with shrill denunciation and threats, only proves the point.  Nor is it only extreme sexual perversion that has clouded our society’s collective reason.  From the expansion of drug legalization, to the non-stop absorption in entertainments of various kinds, to the imbecilic “foodie” phenomenon, our culture is now thoroughly “sensate” in Pitirim Sorokin’s sense.  Hence, vast swaths of intellectual life have been marshalled to serve as a kind of apologetics for vice, the concocting of ever more absurd rationalizations for the indulgence of disordered passion. 

The lowest of the appetites now have, as it were, their fetish boot on the neck of the intellect.  As Harper prophesied: “When the eye of the understanding is clouded over with the film of irregular desires; then false philosophies are most hopeful of triumph” (p. 466).

Social media’s fifth circle

Marshall McLuhan’s famous remark that “the medium is the message” was never more true than in the case of Twitter.  And the message is malign.  I would not go so far as to claim that the platform is a malum in se, but it is close.  The reason is not because of its political biases, though that hardly helps.  It’s because the medium of its nature tends positively to encourage activity contrary to what is good for us given our nature as rational social animals.

Here’s what happens.  You read or hear about something you disagree with.  You make a snap judgment, and send out a tweet about it.  Because it’s a snap judgment, there is a very strong chance of its being wrong or half-baked or otherwise defective.  Because you’ve got relatively few words to make your point, you’re likely to oversimplify things, and because you want it to get attention – why write it, otherwise? – you’re likely to make it snarky, or even insulting toward whoever it is you’re disagreeing with.

Dozens, even hundreds or thousands of people, respond to what you say very quickly – also with snap judgments of their own that are often defective in just the ways yours is likely to be.  If lots of them agree with you, you will tend to think you must have gotten things more or less right – especially given that they are likely to share whatever snarky and condescending attitude you evinced in your tweet.  The self-congratulatory echo chamber artificially inflates everyone’s confidence in their shared judgments.  On the other hand, if lots of people disagree with you, they are also likely to do so in a nasty and condescending way that will make you defensive and disinclined to consider that you might be wrong.  Either way, you are going to be hardened in your position, however ill-considered it actually is.

Moreover, since you soon find that you are playing to this mob, you are likely to tailor your thoughts to please, or at least not offend, whatever part of it is more or less friendly to you.  And you are likely to try to save face with the part of it that is hostile to you, which requires doubling down rather than backing down.  This dynamic plays out over and over again week after week, month after month, year after year.  The result is a dulling of critical faculties and human sympathy on the part of the individual, and militant, intolerant groupthink on the part of the masses of users. 

The point is not that snark or an aggressive tone are always and inherently wrong.  They are not.  But they should only ever be resorted to when necessary, only after reflection, and only ever as a supplement to a reasoned case that can stand on its own.  They are like strong seasoning that is appropriate only to some dishes, and only when applied with moderation. 

Now, the book or article format of its very nature encourages the making of a more careful case, and the second-guessing of a biting quip that may sound less wise or called for after one has “slept on it.”  Having an editor helps too, obviously.  Naturally, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an enormous amount of garbage published in those formats.  All the same, of their nature, they at least do not allow for the instantaneous public expression of snap judgments and emotional overreactions.

The trouble with platforms like Twitter is that of their very nature, they not only allow for but positively encourage these things, and on a massive scale.  Facebook is only somewhat better.  These “social media” are deeply anti-social, encouraging polarization and making sober and dispassionate discourse increasingly difficult.

Now, individual right-wingers and left-wingers alike can be and have been guilty of the sins in question.  But to see the perfect harmony of diabolical message and corrupting medium, you have to look left.  It is no accident that the Gnostic cult that is the “Critical Social Justice” movement has flourished in this toxic social media environment, like a tapeworm inside a large intestine.  Its Manichean division of human beings into oppressors and oppressed and its contempt for logic and objectivity as masks of the oppressor provide an ideological rationalization for the simple-minded sloganeering, ad hominem abuse, and manufactured mob outrage to which social media platforms are already prone.  And the seething envy and resentment which, as Platoand Nietzschewarn us, are the emotional fuel of egalitarian politics, make the combination positively addictive.

In “Critical Social Justice” and its social media driven cancel culture, what would otherwise be mere individual human foibles become the consciously embraced and ruthlessly applied tactics of a political program.  It is as if Twitter and other contemporary social media had been summoned from Dante’s fifth circle to supply a mouth through which this monster of hatred and unreason might shriek.  

Related reading:

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

Woke ideology is a psychological disorder

Wrath and its daughters

Psychoanalyzing the sexual revolutionary

Envy cancels justice

The Bizarro world of left-wing politics

Corporate persons

A neglected insight of Scholastic political philosophy and traditional conservatism is that institutions can have a personalnature.  The Church, a government, a business firm, a university, a club, and similar social formations are like this.  They can be said to make decisions, to act and to be morally and legally responsible for the consequences of those actions, and to have rights and duties.  They can be praised or blamed, loved or hated, and loyally supported or betrayed.  They can be born, grow, flourish, decline, and die.  They can exhibit distinctive virtues, vices, and other character traits.  They can become corrupted or be reformed.  Since they have such personal attributes (or something analogous to them, anyway) the tradition refers to them as moral personsor corporate persons.

The importance of the notion of the corporate person was central to the thought of Roger Scruton.  As he notes in an important essay on the topic, a corporate person can survive death, as in the case of a throne that is vacant for an extended period of time, so that the government of which its occupant was the head is dormant until someone finally sits upon it again.  He also notes that while corporate persons cannot be said to have anything like sensory experiences, they can be said to have beliefs, intentions, and the like.

Though Scruton does not draw the connection, this seems to make corporate persons analogous to souls, which survive the death of the body and retain their rational powers after death despite losing the exercise of their sensory powers.  The flesh and blood human beings who make up the membership and leadership of a corporate person would, accordingly, be analogous to its body.

Scruton also notes that some corporate persons can be utterly malign, such as the Nazi and Communist parties.  By my analogy, such corporate persons may be likened to damned and impenitent souls, or perhaps to demons who have gotten possession of the “bodies” comprised of their leaders and members.  (That’s a metaphor.  I am not saying that the latter are all literally demon-possessed.)

A corporate person could instead be infallible, as Catholics claim the Church is.  That doesn’t mean that the individual members cannot err, including the pope when he is not speaking ex cathedra.  It means that the “mind of the Church” as a corporate person cannot fall into error, and the reason a pope cannot err when speaking ex cathedra is that in such an act he is giving definitive expression to the mind of the Church.

Then there can be corporate persons that fluctuate between evil and good.  The Roman Empire was such a corporate person.  As persecutor of the Church, it was evil.  The post-Constantinian empire, and then the Holy Roman Empire that revived it, was that same corporate person converted to Christianity and baptized.  The periods in which the throne was empty amounted to the corporate person becoming dormant, like a disembodied soul.  According to the medieval legend of the Last Roman Emperor, the same corporate person will be revived anew to defend the Church.  And the empire of Antichrist might be interpreted as that same corporate person becoming apostate in the last days and returning to its role as persecutor.

Most corporate persons are, of course, nowhere near as colorful as these examples.  They would be the governments, firms, clubs, and the like with which we deal in everyday life.  And that brings us to what we usually think of today when we hear the word “corporate” – corporations in the business sense.  Corporations of this kind are not intrinsically evil, but neither are they intrinsically benign.  Like human persons, they can become corrupted.  In particular, like human persons, they can become corrupted by the tenor of the society that surrounds them.  And they can become corrupted en masse when the society that surrounds them crosses a certain threshold of decadence.  The difference is that they wield enormous power, and thus can do much greater evil than an individual corrupt person can – for example, by massively accelerating, through their influence, the general social decadence that has infected them.

Part of the corruption that can occur is the kind you would expect.  Business corporations exist in order to make money, and like human persons, they can be tempted to do so in immoral ways.  For example, corporate persons, like persons in the ordinary sense, have patriotic duties and duties of solidarity toward the fellow members of the community within which they operate.  And they violate these duties when they let considerations of profit override their obligations to their country and its citizens (by needlessly offshoring jobs, working to relax immigration laws so as to secure cheap labor, etc.).  Modern American conservatives have become more sensitive to this problem in recent years, though market fundamentalism still blinds too many of them to it.

At the same time, it is a serious error to think that profit is all that drives corporations, any more than it is all that drives human persons.  Hence, it is an error to think that greed is the only sort of corruption to which they are prone.  This is something else that modern American conservatives are coming to learn, the hard way.  Corporations could make enormous amounts of money catering to the distinctive tastes and interests of traditional religious believers and others with conservative attitudes.  But they show little interest in doing so.  The reason is that they now largely share the same liberal and secular worldview that prevails in academia, entertainment, and the Democratic Party, and are willing to forego profits that would be earned in a way that might promote contrary values.  Moreover, they now seem increasingly willing to make political enemies of those with contrary values, and actively to promote the interests of their favored party and its ideology even at the expense of alienating some customers.

In his article, Scruton describes how, in Lenin’s Soviet Union, the Communist Party either obliterated all corporate persons other than itself, or so deeply infiltrated them that they became nothing more than its masks.  Nothing was left to stand between the Party and individuals, and the Party treated them as raw material to be molded according to a totalitarian plan rather than as fellow persons whose rights have to be respected and whose concerns and opinions had to be rationally engaged with.  The result, Scruton writes, was:

one corporate person standing triumphant amid the ruins of social life: the Party itself.  But it [was] a monstrous person, no longer capable of moral conduct; a person which cannot take responsibility for its actions, and which can confess to its faults only as ‘errors’ imposed on it by misguided members, and never as its own actions, for which repentance and atonement are due… Like its shortlived disciple, the Nazi party, it [was] a corporate psychopath, respected by none, and feared by all. (pp. 263-4)

In the United States, at the moment, there is no party with the size, apparatus, military muscle, or violent ruthlessness of Lenin’s Communist Party.  What we do have, in the Gnostic cult of Critical Race Theory, is a party line in search of a Party, an ideology as shrill, intolerant, and simple-minded as that of Lenin.  And its sweep through the political class, journalism, the federal government, schools and universities, churches, and corporate HR departments gives every appearance of a corporate mind coming to consciousness and attempting to assemble for itself a body.  Not by way of violent takeover, but by a kind of voluntary euthanasia of independent corporate persons, as they happily make of themselves the organs of this new entity which will rid the world of “whiteness,” “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity” and other objects of egalitarian hatred, as Lenin sought to rid the world of the bourgeois.

Whether this new “corporate psychopath” will in fact arise, and precisely what form it will take if it does, remain to be seen.  But as fallible corporate persons, like human persons, become increasingly infected with madness and evil, the one infallible corporate person that is the Church must get her bearings so that she might more effectively resist them.  For though she cannot die, she can become sick, to the extent that the human beings who make up her body are faithless, feckless, cowardly, and muddleheaded.  There can be only one proper response to the fanatical imposition of error and immorality to which our institutions are being increasingly given over.  It is not dialogue, and it is not fleeing for fear of the wolves, but rather holy intransigence in defense of orthodoxy and sanctity, born of faithful confidence in the Church’s divine Spouse, who will never leave her nor forsake her.

Voila! An open thread! (Updated)

UPDATE 4/20: Lately the comments sections have been filling up quickly.  Some readers seem unaware that after the count reaches 200 comments, you have to click the "Load more..." prompt that appears in small print at the bottom of the combox in order to view newer comments.  That's part of Blogger's algorithm and out of my control, sorry.  So, if you're worried that your comment is not showing up, never fear.  It's there, but you have to click the prompt to see it.
How does an annoying off-topic comment suitable only for deletion get transformed into a stimulating on-topic conversation starter?  Through the magic of the open thread post.  Whatever is on your mind, from The Prestige to Under Siege, from the Ponzo illusion to jazz-rock fusion, from Paul Bernays to Ricky Gervais, post away and stand back in wonder as your comment not only doesn’t disappear, but may even get a response!

Though probably not from me (too busy, sorry) and definitely not if you’re a troll.  On that latter, perennial topic: Our latest pest is some weirdo who keeps posting odd comments under different names, carrying on conversations with himself while pretending it is other commenters who are guilty of this childish behavior.  As always, please ignore such people.  And as always, please resist any urge to respond to gratuitous abuse or other obnoxiousness in a way that is likely to spiral into an endless and unedifying exchange of insults.  As time and attention permits, I will delete this garbage.  Please remember that you are a guest here.  Act accordingly.

Also, too many people keep posting anonymously, making exchanges confusing.  If you don’t want to post under your own name or through a Google account, fine, but at least choose some one consistent pseudonym to post under so that people don’t have to keep trying to figure out which anonymous commenter said what. 

For anyone who is interested, earlier open threads are archived here.

Voila! An open thread!

How does an annoying off-topic comment suitable only for deletion get transformed into a stimulating on-topic conversation starter?  Through the magic of the open thread post.  Whatever is on your mind, from The Prestige to Under Siege, from the Ponzo illusion to jazz-rock fusion, from Paul Bernays to Ricky Gervais, post away and stand back in wonder as your comment not only doesn’t disappear, but may even get a response!

Though probably not from me (too busy, sorry) and definitely not if you’re a troll.  On that latter, perennial topic: Our latest pest is some weirdo who keeps posting odd comments under different names, carrying on conversations with himself while pretending it is other commenters who are guilty of this childish behavior.  As always, please ignore such people.  And as always, please resist any urge to respond to gratuitous abuse or other obnoxiousness in a way that is likely to spiral into an endless and unedifying exchange of insults.  As time and attention permits, I will delete this garbage.  Please remember that you are a guest here.  Act accordingly.

Also, too many people keep posting anonymously, making exchanges confusing.  If you don’t want to post under your own name or through a Google account, fine, but at least choose some one consistent pseudonym to post under so that people don’t have to keep trying to figure out which anonymous commenter said what. 

For anyone who is interested, earlier open threads are archived here.

Aquinas and the problem of evil

My article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” has just been published in the journal Religions , and is available online.  (Follow the links to opt for either the HTML format or PDF.)  It is a contribution to a special issue devoted to responses to James Sterba’s recent book Is a Good God Logically Possible?