Edward Feser's Blog, page 34

Perfect love casts out fear

Months of lawlessness have left people on edge and anxious, and their anxiety is unlikely to be much abated by the outcome of the election.  For either the party of lawlessness will win, or it will lose and manifest its fury in further rioting, looting, burning, hounding of political enemies, and attempted subversion of lawful authorities.  There remains much to be anxious about either way, and there likely will be for some time. 

But there is nothing to fear.  Fear results from the prospect of losing what we love.  Now, love is more perfect the more perfect its object and the more perfect the will’s fixity on that object.  But the most perfect object of love is God, and the most perfect love for God is that which wills him above all else, to the point of forsaking all else if need be.  And if we have this perfect love, we love that which cannot be taken from us.  Hence we can be free from fear.  “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).

But not only can we be free of it, we must strive to be free of it.  For as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches:

Our Lord said (Matthew 10:28): “Fear ye not them that kill the body,” thus forbidding worldly fear… Worldly love is, properly speaking, the love whereby a man trusts in the world as his end, so that worldly love is always evil.  Now fear is born of love, since man fears the loss of what he loves, as Augustine states.  Now worldly fear is that which arises from worldly love as from an evil root, for which reason worldly fear is always evil. (Summa Theologiae II-II.19.3)

Yet the flesh is weak and our nerves are understandably frayed, so that cold logic and bracing reproof oughtn’t to have the last word.  Let us give that to Him who is the object of our love:

So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you… I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace.  In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. (John 16:22, 33)

“Pastoral” and other weasel words

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.  If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

Analects of Confucius, Book XIII

But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’  For whatever is more than these is from the evil one. 

Matthew 5:37

“Weasel words,” as that expression is usually understood, are words that are deliberately used in a vague or ambiguous way so as to allow the speaker to avoid saying what he really thinks.  The phrase is inspired by the way a weasel can suck out the contents of an egg in a manner that leaves the shell largely intact.  A weasel word is like a hollowed-out egg, one that seems on the surface to have content but which is in fact empty.

In The Fatal Conceit, F. A. Hayek discusses how weasel words are often put to ideological purposes, in a way that can not only hide the true implications of the speaker’s views but even make them seem the opposite of what they really are, given the normal meanings of the terms he abuses.  Hayek’s Exhibit A is the adjective “social,” as used in phrases like “social justice.”  Naturally, the word “justice” is unobjectionable, and the word “social” by itself tends to connote the agreeable idea of attention to others and their needs.  But the phrase “social justice” is, in the mouths of left-wingers, often used as a fig leaf for ideas and programs that are by no means innocuous.  Hayek was writing at a time before the obnoxious “Social Justice Warrior” phenomenon, but it vividly illustrates his point, SJW “cancel culture” being the very opposite of either just or social.  Yet many people fall for it, because the label “social justice” sounds like the sort of thing that must be OK.

In other words, the use of a weasel word doesn’t always merely involve evacuating it of its original meaning.  Sometimes it also involves inserting into the hollowed out shell a new and opposite meaning.  But the positive connotations associated with the original meaning facilitate the listener’s acquiescing to the sleight of hand.

Weasel words have become an ecclesiastical lingua franca in Catholic circles in recent decades.  Words like “pastoral,” “dialogue,” “accompaniment,” and “discernment” would be examples.  They are, first of all, both vague and touchy-feely in a way that says little but generates pleasant associations, and thus are calculated to cause no offense – indeed, to reassure. 

They are, that is to say, soft words.  The comedian George Carlin had some choice remarks about soft language, and even the soft names that so many people prefer to give their children these days.  (Non-soft language warning for those who click on those links.)  Carlin opines that “soft names make soft people.”  Whatever one thinks of that thesis, soft words certainly make for soft minds, minds that cannot think clearly and logically and cannot abide firm judgments and plain speaking.  The great churchmen of the past used hard words like “sin,” “penance,” “conversion,” “damnation,” “heresy,” “orthodoxy”– the language of scripture, of the Fathers, of the saints.  Too many modern churchmen talk like kindergarten teachers.

But it’s worse than just being bland and inoffensive.  For the effect of these words is not merely to be silent about orthodoxy.  In some cases they are used in a way that implies the opposite of orthodoxy.  Consider one common use the word “pastoral.”  On the one hand, its original connotations are entirely positive.  It conjures up images of Christ as the Good Shepherd, or of a kindly priest gently advising a penitent or comforting someone in grief.  A pastor is someone who guides us to safety.  Hence the listener is halfway ready to accept anything to which the “pastoral” label is affixed.

Yet it is often affixed to actions and policies that involve the precise opposite of leading the faithful to safety.  Consider, for example, the way some churchmen have commented on Pope Francis’s recently reported remarks about same-sex civil unions, or on his apparent approval of giving Holy Communion to some couples living in adultery – both of which seem at odds with Catholic doctrine.  Some churchmen have tried to reassure Catholics that the pope was not in fact contradicting doctrine, but merely being “pastoral.”

But in a Catholic context, being truly “pastoral” would entail encouraging and helping the faithful (however gently) to live more perfectly in accordance with Church doctrine.  And the problem with the pope’s remarks is that they give the appearance of excusing or even facilitating not living in accordance with it.  Suppose a literal shepherd saw one of his sheep wandering over to where the wolves are and refrained from stopping it, or even gave it a little reassuring wink to indicate that all was well.  To characterize such action as “pastoral” would, to say the least, be a very odd use of the term.

In short, the word “pastoral” has become a weasel word in the sense Hayek warned of – the original meaning has been hollowed out, and a nearly opposite meaning has been insinuated in its place, while the kindly associations the word generates have lulled many into accepting this shift.

Or consider “discernment.”  A “discerning” person is someone who can make sound judgments in complex circumstances, who finds clarity in what is murky.  Naturally, no one can object to that.  But in defending the policy of allowing those living in adultery to receive Holy Communion, some have not only emptied the term of any clear meaning but even insinuated an opposite meaning – of finding murkiness where there has always been clarity.  The Church has always taught that a validly married couple can never divorce and remarry, that adulterous sexual acts are always gravely immoral, that those with no intention of refraining from them cannot receive absolution or take Holy Communion, and so on.  Some churchmen have been tying themselves in logical knots trying to find ways to justify exceptions to these clear and binding principles – all in the name of “discernment.”

Then there is “dialogue.”  The term connotes free and frank discussion with the aim of mutual understanding.  Once again, no one can object to that.  But in practice, “dialogue” in Catholic contexts is rarely frank and leads to obfuscation rather than understanding.  For example, a truly frank discussion between Christians and adherents of other religions, or between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians, would very quickly reveal that while they all have important things in common, there are also very deep and irreconcilable differences.  As a matter of basic logic, they simply cannot all be right about the matters that set them apart.  Hence, if you are a Catholic, you cannot avoid the judgment that the distinctive positions of non-Catholics are simply in error.

This is, of course, why in practice “dialogue” never leads anywhere.  A truly honest dialogue would soon result in the parties saying to one another: “Sorry, but you’re wrong, and you need to convert,” or at least “We’ll just have to agree to disagree.”  But neither of these is touchy-feely enough for your standard dialoguer.  So the “dialogue” is never actually free, much less frank or likely to result in understanding.  Anything that might result in clear, firm, and final judgments of incompatibility is kept off the table.

Of the weasel words referred to, “accompaniment” is the most vacuous.  Like other Catholic weasel words, it sounds good.  It connotes togetherness, or keeping someone from being lonely on a journey.  But a journey where?  Vague as they are, “pastoral,” “discernment,” and “dialogue” all connote some end state, at least in a very general way – safety in the first case, clarity in the second, mutual understanding in the third.  “Accompaniment” lacks even that.  Being vaguely agreeable in its connotations but extremely unspecific in its implications, talk of “accompaniment” is, by itself, even less likely to raise suspicions than the other words.

In practice, though, those we’re told to “accompany” always seem to be intent on going in a direction opposite to the one Catholic moral teaching commands.  And that can only lead to one place.  It is bad enough when a pastor refrains from warning those headed for ruin.  But a pastor who recommends “accompanying” them is like the shepherd who sends other sheep off in the same direction as the one wandering toward the wolves.

Related posts:

Against candy-ass Christianity

Nudge nudge, wink wink

Some varieties of bullsh*t

Dupré on the ideologizing of science

Philosopher of science John Dupré, like Nancy Cartwright, Paul Feyerabend, and others, has developed powerful and influential criticisms of reductionism.  Whereas Cartwright is best known for her criticisms of reductionism in the context of physics, Dupré has tended to focus instead on biology (though both have addressed the other sciences as well).  Like Cartwright, his style is less mischievous and polemical than Feyerabend’s was.  Dupré’s essay “The Miracle of Monism” is a useful overview of his approach, and contains lessons especially relevant at a time when science (or at least the use to which it is put in public policy) has become ideologized.

The “monism” Dupré has in mind is related to the notion of the “Unity of Science,” which, he notes, can be interpreted in either or both of two ways: as entailing a unity of method or a unity of content.  On the first interpretation, there is a single “Scientific Method” that all the sciences apply in their respective domains.  Baconian inductivism and Popperian falsificationism would be stock examples.  On the second interpretation, there is a single subject matter that all the different sciences are ultimately about.  The stock example here would be the reductionist thesis that all the facts of chemistry, biology, psychology, etc. are really “nothing but” facts about basic particles and the laws governing them, so that anything we say about the former should at least in principle be translatable into statements about the latter. 

Belief in “unity of method” traditionally lent plausibility to the “unity of content” idea.  More ambitious versions of reductionism are now widely rejected, but as Dupré notes, the spirit of reductionism lives on (as is evident from the work of many prominent philosophersand scientists).  It is the metaphysical vision represented by the “unity of content” idea that Dupré has in mind by “monism.”  By calling it a “miracle,” Dupré is being cheeky.  The empirical evidence, he argues, is firmly against either interpretation of the “Unity of Science” thesis.  Hence it would be a miracle if monism were true.  The thesis is a “myth” or an “ideology,” he says, and like other myths and ideologies it thrives not because of any evidential merits but because it serves certain functions. 

Pluralism versus unity

The problems with attempts to formulate a single “Scientific Method” have been well-known in the philosophy of science for decades.  As Dupré points out, the very idea that there is some uniform procedure deployed by physicists when they search for a new particle, by molecular biologists when they look for the genetic basis of cancer, by coleopterists when they classify beetles, and by sociologists when they carry out a statistical investigation of a hypothesis (to borrow Dupré’s examples), was never terribly plausible in the first place.  In reality, scientific methodologies are as diverse as the domains scientists investigate and the very different problems those domains pose.

The bulk of Dupré’s attention is devoted to criticizing the metaphysical interpretation of the “Unity of Science” idea.  The problems with various specific reductionist projects are also well-known.  Reductionist positions in the philosophy of mind face notorious difficulties.  Dupré himself has made important contributions to the literature demonstrating the failure of reductionism in biology.  Powerful anti-reductionist arguments have been developed in recent years even in the philosophy of chemistry.  (I survey all of this anti-reductionist literature in the philosophy of science in Aristotle’s Revenge.)

One “monist” solution to the problem posed by the failure of reductionism is to opt for eliminativism.  If classical genetics cannot be reduced to molecular genetics, then, the eliminativist holds, we must simply eliminate classical genetics and replace it with molecular genetics; if mental phenomena cannot be reduced to neural phenomena, then we must simply eliminate the mental from our picture of human nature and replace it with a purely neural description of human behavior; and so on.

Now, none of these eliminativist positions is ultimately coherent.  (Again, see Aristotle’s Revenge.)  But more to Dupré’s point, there is no empiricalevidence for them whatsoever.  They are motivated instead by the demands of an ideological metaphysical vision, not by any considerations from genetics, neuroscience, or what have you.

Dupré notes that the thesis of the “completeness of physics” is sometimes appealed to in defense of the monistic metaphysical vision.  This is the idea that whatever exists or happens in the world does so by virtue of what exists and happens at the level of basic particles and the laws that govern them.  As Alex Rosenberg likes to put it, “the physical facts fix all the facts.”  But this thesis is itself merely another part of the “monistic” ideological position dogmatically adhered to, for as Dupré observes, “there is essentially no evidence for the completeness of physics.”  Indeed, the failure of reductionism (in chemistry, biology, psychology, the social sciences, etc.) is itselfempirical evidence against the completeness of physics.  There is simply too much about the world as we know it from actual experience (as opposed to tendentious metaphysical theory) that cannot be captured in a description that confines itself to the entities and laws recognized by physics.

People who think the predictive and technological successes of physics prove otherwise are drawing precisely the wrong lesson, in Dupré’s view.  It is, as he points out, extremely difficult to get physical reality into the right sort of artificial laboratory conditions in which the laws of physics will actually accurately describe it.  Most real world circumstances are simply too complex for the laws to be anything more than approximations.  The idea that the description physics gives us of such idiosyncratic systems is true of the world as a whole is an extrapolation for which there is no empirical warrant.  What physics describes are abstractions from physical reality, rather than physical reality in all its concrete richness.  Its precision is, accordingly, a “red herring” in Dupré’s estimation.  (Here Dupré is, of course, making a point that has also been developed in depth by Nancy Cartwright in a number of works.)

What actual experience reveals to us is a pluralityof domains of physical reality to which a pluralityof methods must be applied if we are to understand them – rather than a single monolithic reality that can be captured via a single monolithic “Scientific Method.”

Functions of the myth

Why does the ideology survive if there is no evidence for it?  Dupré notes that it serves a couple of interests.  First, the idea that there is a single monolithic “Scientific Method” that all scientists employ serves the function of lending unearned prestige to the less solid areas of scientific inquiry.  It “distributes epistemic warrant” and thereby “provides solidarity and protects the weaker brethren,” as Dupré says.  If physics, chemistry, evolutionary psychology, macroeconomics, meteorology, epidemiology, etc. are all really just the same thing – ScienceTM, applications of The Scientific MethodTM– then some of the eminence of an Einstein or a Schrödinger thereby rubs off on the likes of (say) a Neil Ferguson or an Anthony Fauci. 

If instead we see that there is no single “Scientific Method” but rather a patchwork of diverse enterprises, some of which are more solid and successful than others, then each has to fend for itself.  One can no longer pretend that, say, doubting the wisdom of lockdowns (my example, not Dupré’s) is like doubting quantum mechanics, as if they were somehow equally plausible deliverances of “the science.”

A second reason the myth survives, Dupré tentatively suggests, is that it sometimes serves the interests of the rich and powerful.  He gives the example of the overuse of drugs to treat emotional and behavioral problems, such as the use of Ritalin to deal with ADHD in boys.  The reductionist assumption that mental phenomena are really “nothing but” neural phenomena can make the use of drugs falsely seem “more scientific” than an approach that emphasizes the psychological level of description or environmental factors.  Those in authority can satisfy themselves that they have solved a problem with a chemical “quick fix,” and drug companies can reap profits.  (The way in which the myth of a monolithic Scientific Method can function as an instrument of authoritarian social control is a theme of F. A. Hayek’s classic The Counter-Revolution of Science.)

Science ain’t all that

Dupré rightly admires the achievements of the sciences, but rejects the scientism that would deny the necessity or legitimacy of other approaches to studying reality.  Though there is no single scientific method, there are “epistemic virtues” that science at its best exhibits, such as “understanding, explanation, prediction, and control.”  However, fields of study other than the sciences can exhibit such virtues as well.  Indeed, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Dupré notes that in some ways, scientists often think less criticallythan people working in other fields (such as philosophy) do.  He writes: “Of course, scientists have very heated disputes about the details of their empirical or theoretical claims, but these take place within a context that is not, on the whole, called into question.”  (What he has in mind here is, of course, Kuhn’s thesis that “normal science” involves solving problems within a “paradigm” that is dutifully upheld rather than challenged.)

What the advance of knowledge requires is a pluralityof overlapping approaches – both scientific (physics, neuroscience, etc.) and non-scientific (philosophy, history, etc.) – to the study of a plurality of kinds of reality.

Related reading:

Scientism: America’s State Religion

The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist

Fallacies physicists fall for

One Long Circular Argument

Science and Scientism

Blinded by Scientism

Rosenberg roundup

Mind and Cosmos roundup

Scientism roundup

Lockdowns versus social justice

The phrase “social justice” has a long and honorable history in Catholic social thought going back to the nineteenth century, but is now typically deployed in defense of policies that are diametrically opposed to social justice as the Church and its thinkers have always understood it.  And unfortunately, this is true even in the case of many Catholics, who lazily adopt various leftist attitudes and policies simply because they are falsely but relentlessly presented as concomitants of “social justice.” 

Last April, Fr. John Naugle argued in an important article at Rorate Caelithat indefinite lockdowns violate the natural human right to labor in order to provide for oneself and one’s family, and thus are deeply contrary to social justice.  He revisits the issue in a follow-up article.  Some Catholic defenders of the lockdowns are people who, in other contexts, claim to stand up for the rights of workers and to oppose consequentialist thinking.  But as Fr. Naugle points out, their rationalizations for the lockdowns are precisely consequentialist in character – pitting the alleged benefits of lockdowns against inviolable natural rights – and harm workers far more than any other segment of society.

If you are inclined to write off such concerns as motivated by right-wing politics, I invite you to consider an interview with two public health experts from the left-wing journal Jacobin, to which Fr. Naugle draws our attention.  From the interview:

Children and young adults have minimal risk, and there is no scientific or public health rationale to close day care centers, schools, or colleges.  In-person education is critically important for both the intellectual and social development for all kids, but school closures are especially harmful for working-class children whose parents cannot afford tutors, pod schools, or private schools…

Lockdowns have been vastly unfair in their impact and have exacerbated disparities in wealth and power.  Millions of working-class people have lost their jobs and find it impossible to find new ones in the current shuttered economy.  (It is remarkable that the media pay so little attention to the extreme economic hardship being endured by millions of people who were already struggling to make ends meet before the pandemic.) …

I think the lockdown is the worst assault on the working class in half a century, and especially on the urban working class.  In effect, we are protecting low-risk college students and young professionals who can work from home at the expense of older, high-risk, working-class people that have no choice but to work, leading to more deaths overall.  There have been studies, for example in Toronto, that show that lockdowns have primarily protected high-income, low-minority neighborhoods, but not low-income or high-minority neighborhoods…

Many of us pay lip service to equality and anti-racism, but we have chosen lockdowns to protect ourselves while throwing the working class under the bus…

I think the liberal elites’ adoption of this approach stems from the easy appeal of keeping “everyone” safe together with a class position for which the lockdown strategy is in fact safer as well as quite easy to ride out.  Liberal elites simply can’t see or can’t feel how this strategy continues to fail the working class and also small business owners.

End quote.  Read the whole thing, as they say.  The evidence in favor of these judgments – which are straightforward matters of fact, neither right-wing nor left-wing – mounts day by day.  Opening schools has not caused the virus to spread.  Even opening theme parks has not resulted in outbreaks.  In general, the lockdowns are not only not necessary to prevent the spread of the virus, but in fact have done little or nothing to prevent it.  And they have no effect on the illness’s mortality rate.  Meanwhile, they have benefited the rich while doing massive harm to the poor and the working class.  For example, they have benefited large corporations while harming small businesses.  They have brought about a crisis in mental health.  They have been imposed in a way that unjustly discriminates against Christiansand Orthodox Jews.  As the Jacobin interview indicates, scientists and other public health experts are increasingly coming out against lockdowns.  The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has decried their overuse.  A number of prominent public health experts have issued the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for alternatives to lockdowns as a way of dealing with the virus.

In short, the lockdowns have done no provable good while causing massive manifest harm, especially to the weakest among us.  Accordingly, they amount to a grave social injustice. 

And yet Joe Biden – the same man who will not tell us whether he intends to destroy the independence of the judiciary – cynically bemoans the economic crisis of recent months while at the same time supporting the very lockdowns that caused it.   Worse, he has also indicated that if elected he might impose another pointless nationwide lockdown.  One-party dictatorship and economic collapse – quite the presidential platform.  Naturally, it is supported by the same sorts of lunatics who think that looting and burning down the businesses of poor and middle class people, and removing police protection from them, are great advances in “social justice.”

Related posts:

The rule of lawlessness

Scientism: America’s state religion

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 Church embraces Columbus

We saw in a recent post how the Scholastic theologian Bartolomé de Las Casas vigorously defended the rights and dignity of the American Indians against the cruelty of Spanish conquistadors.  Las Casas in no way minimized the extent of this cruelty.  On the contrary, he is commonly accused of exaggeration and overzealousness.  So what did Las Casas think of Columbus?  Did he condemn him as an initiator of oppression?

Quite the opposite.  As Anthony Pagden tells us in his introduction to Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies:

Las Casas's understanding of the historical and eschatological significance of the discovery and conquest of America contrasted an early vision of peaceful settlement with the rapacious horrors of the conquests which followed.  Columbus, whose diary he preserved and edited, had, in Las Casas's view, been chosen by God for his learning and virtue to bring the Gospel to the New World.  It was for this, he wrote, ‘that he was called Christopher, that is to say Christum ferens, which means carrier or bearer of Christ’.  It was the Spanish settlers… who had transformed a trading and evangelizing mission… into genocidal colonization. (p. xv)

Like Las Casas, some contemporary historians have rejected any suggestion that the attitudes and actions of later settlers can justly be attributed to Columbus himself.  He does not fit the caricature painted by the mobs of ignorant bigots pulling down his statues.

On the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, Pope Leo XIII wrote:

For [Columbus’s] exploit is in itself the highest and grandest which any age has ever seen accomplished by man; and he who achieved it, for the greatness of his mind and heart, can be compared to but few in the history of humanity.  By his toil another world emerged from the unsearched bosom of the ocean: … greatest of all, by the acquisition of those blessings of which Jesus Christ is the author, they have been recalled from destruction to eternal life…

We consider that this immortal achievement should be recalled by Us with memorial words.  For Columbus is ours… it is indubitable that the Catholic faith was the strongest motive for the inception and prosecution of the design; so that for this reason also the whole human race owes not a little to the Church…

We say not that he was unmoved by perfectly honourable aspirations after knowledge, and deserving well of human society; nor did he despise glory, which is a most engrossing ideal to great souls; nor did he altogether scorn a hope of advantages to himself; but to him far before all these human considerations was the consideration of his ancient faith... This view and aim is known to have possessed his mind above all; namely, to open a way for the Gospel over new lands and seas…

It is fitting that we should confess and celebrate in an especial manner the will and designs of the Eternal Wisdom, under whose guidance the discoverer of the New World placed himself with a devotion so touching.

In order, therefore, that the commemoration of Columbus may be worthily observed, religion must give her assistance to the secular ceremonies.  And as at the time of the first news of the discovery public thanksgiving was offered by the command of the Sovereign Pontiff to Almighty God, so now we have resolved to act in like manner in celebrating the anniversary of this auspicious event.  (Leo XIII, Quarto Abeunte Saeculo 1-3, 7-8)

On the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, Pope St. John Paul II expressed similar sentiments:

“On October 12, exactly five centuries ago, Admiral Christopher Columbus, with his three ships, arrived in these lands and planted the cross of Christ,” John Paul said.  “That is the beginning of the sowing of the precious seed of faith.  And how can we not give thanks for that?  [The Europeans] announced the love of God our savior to people whose sacrifices to their gods included human sacrifice.” The Roman Catholic Church was at the forefront of efforts to curb the abuses that followed, he said. (“Pope Lauds Church’s 1492 Role,” The Washington Post, October 13, 1992)

Notice what the views of Las Casas, Leo XIII, and John Paul II have in common – the conviction that the Catholic faith is true.  And if it is true, then the benefits of Columbus’s bringing of Christianity to the New World outweigh everything else, for they concern the eternal salvation of souls.  Left-wingers are often willing to overlook the racism of thinkers like Margaret Sanger and Karl Marx, because they believe that the ideas they are best known for are good and important.  In fact those ideas are vile, but it is certainly reasonable to insist that a person ought to be evaluated in terms of his whole life and thought, and not merely his worst aspects.  How much more so in the case of Columbus, a sincere Catholic who, though not a perfect man, was not personally guilty of the wrongs falsely attributed to him? 

But one need not believe in the salvation of souls in order to see the point.  For the irony is that it is in the name of values that the liberal, secular West inherited from Christianity that Columbus’s critics condemn him – values the critics wouldn’t have in the first place were it not for the Christianization of the Americas that Columbus initiated.  If they were to undo what Columbus did, they would undo themselves.

Addendum: Since it's a holiday, some celebratory music might be appropriate.  So give a listen to the old swing tune "Christopher Columbus," whether the classic Fletcher Henderson version, the Duke Ellington remake, or Dinah Washington's vocals.

Joe Biden versus “democratic norms”

No one who claims to favor Biden over Trump on the grounds of protecting “democratic norms” can, at this point, be speaking in good faith.  They are either culpably deceiving themselves or cynically trying to deceive others.  Packing the Supreme Court would be as radical a violation of “democratic norms” as any president has ever attempted.  It would destroy the independence of the judiciary, making of the court a dictatorship for the party in power.  Yet Biden and Harris persistently refuse to say whether they favor court-packing.  Biden has now said that voters “don’t deserve” to know his position on this absolutely crucial issue before the election – even though he acknowledges that “it’s a great question” and says he doesn’t blame people for asking it!  Can you imagine the hysteria that would ensue if Trump gave such a lunatic answer to a question that momentous?  This is reason enough not to vote for Biden, whether or not you vote for Trump. 

The reason Biden will not answer, of course, is that his party has moved so extremely far to the left that he can no longer reject court-packing and remain politically viable.  And the depth of his cynicism is evident from the fact that he has himself in the past emphasized how extremely dangerous to a free society packing the court would be.  In 2005, he said that President Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the court in the 1930s showed that he had been “corrupted by power” and that “it took an act of courage on the part of his own party institutionally to stand up against this power grab.”  He condemned “politicians bending to… political exigency” rather than upholding the country’s institutions.  Just last year, Biden said that if Democrats packed the court, “we’ll live to rue that day” and “we begin to lose any credibility the court has at all.”

Yet now, having himself been “corrupted” by the prospect of attaining power, Biden is “bending to political exigency” rather than having the “courage” to “stand up against” the extremist elements in his party – all in the name of protecting democracy against Trump. 

Those extremist elements include his running mate, who was one of eleven Democratic presidential primary candidates who said they were open to packing the Supreme Court.  By contrast, even Bernie Sanders rejected the idea, which shows you how extreme it is.  It is so extreme that even the Left’s hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg – in whose name they would pack the court – was opposed to it, as she made clear in an NPR interview last year:

“Nine seems to be a good number.  It's been that way for a long time,” she said, adding, “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court” …

Roosevelt's proposal would have given him six additional Supreme Court appointments, expanding the court to 15 members.  And Ginsburg sees any similar plan as very damaging to the court and the country.

“If anything would make the court look partisan," she said, “it would be that – one side saying, ‘When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’”

That impairs the idea of an independent judiciary, she said.

End quote.  However bad you think Trump is, he has not transformed the country’s basic political institutions.  His critics shrilly accuse him of being a tyrant and a dictator – perhaps the more paranoid and unhinged among them even believe this nonsense – but the reality is that he has no greater power over the courts, the Congress, the press, and the voters than any other president has had.  If he did, he wouldn’t be in such dire political shape right now.  People who say things like: “Trump’s a dictator!  That’s why he’s about to be voted out!” need to Google the phrase “cognitive dissonance.”

By contrast, Biden is the Kerensky-like Trojan horse for a party that has been so thoroughly taken over by extremists that even its “moderates” are now open to court-packing, not to mention other dangerously illiberal tactics and proposals.  They wouldfundamentally transform our political institutions in the direction of a one-party state. 

It’s that simple.  Trump’s critics are always piously going on about how preserving “democratic norms” is more important than securing short-term political advantage.  It’s time for them to show whether they really mean it.

Related posts:

Aquinas contra sedition and factional tyranny

The rule of lawlessness

Plato predicted woke tyranny

Weigel’s terrible arguments

In his article “Truman’s Terrible Choice” at First Things, George Weigel defends the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I respond at Catholic Herald.

Aquinas contra sedition and factional tyranny

As Aquinas teaches, “the chief concern of the ruler of a multitude… is to procure the unity of peace” (De Regno, Book I, Chapter 3).  All other social goods are subordinate to that, because they all presuppose it.  Without peace, no social good is secure.  Without unity – and in particular, without a shared commitment to a common set of laws, procedures, cultural norms, and the like – no peace is possible.

Now, what we are seeing metastasizing around us in the United States in recent months is a direct assault from the Left on the unity of peace, and thereby on the fundamental prerequisite of any just social order.  The methods and goals of the left-wing mobs looting, rioting, burning, and harassing their way through American cities amount to a seditious assault on the peace of the community.  The intention of some left-wing politicians to abolish the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, eliminate the filibuster, and in other ways secure indefinite one-party rule amounts to an attempt to impose a factional tyranny.  These are extremely dangerous trends, and it is delusional to think that the faults of Donald Trump or the justice of the cause of opposing racism can excuse them or make them any less dangerous.  In the name of social justice, the far Left is attacking the very preconditions of all social justice.

As always, the teaching of St. Thomas illuminates the darkness of our times.

Lawful authority

Let’s go back to first principles.  Why do governments exist?  Well, again, to secure the unity of peace.  But how are they to secure this?  Aquinas’s answer is that of common sense.  He writes, in the Summa Theologiae:

Since some are found to be depraved, and prone to vice, and not easily amenable to words, it was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evil-doing, and leave others in peace, and that they themselves, by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous.  Now this kind of training, which compels through fear of punishment, is the discipline of laws.  Therefore in order that man might have peace and virtue, it was necessary for laws to be framed.  (Summa Theologiae I-II.95.1)

Similarly, in Summa Contra Gentiles, he says:

Since some people are not so disposed internally that they will do spontaneously what the law orders, they must be forced from without to fulfill the justice of the law… [T]his is done only from fear of punishments…

Since some people pay little attention to the punishments inflicted by God, because they are devoted to the objects of sense and care only for the things that are seen, it has been ordered accordingly by divine providence that there be men in various countries whose duty it is to compel these people, by means of sensible and present punishments, to respect justice.  It is obvious that these men do not sin when they punish the wicked, for no one sins by working for justice.  Now, it is just for the wicked to be punished, since by punishment the fault is restored to order, as is clear from our statements above.  Therefore, judges do no wrong in punishing the wicked. (Summa Contra Gentiles III.128, 146)

Note two things about this teaching.  First, it flatly rejects the proposal that police protections would not be necessary if only the right social services were in place, the notion that if only communism were achieved then the need for a coercive state would wither away, and all other such lunatic fantasies running contrary to all human experience.  It is simply part of the human condition that some people will not be restrained from evildoing except by force, so that the need for and legitimacy of the police power of the state is a matter of natural law.

Second, the legitimacy of this police power is backed by divine providence.  Aquinas develops this theme as follows:

Again, in various countries, the men who are put in positions over other men are like executors of divine providence; indeed, God through the order of His providence directs lower beings by means of higher ones, as is evident from what we said before.  But no one sins by the fact that he follows the order of divine providence.  Now, this order of divine providence requires the good to be rewarded and the evil to be punished, as is shown by our earlier remarks.  Therefore, men who are in authority over others do no wrong when they reward the good and punish the evil. (Summa Contra Gentiles III.146)

Here Aquinas is recapitulating the teaching of scripture no less than of natural law.  As St. Paul famously writes:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.  For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.  Would you have no fear of him who is in authority?  Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good.  But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.  (Romans 13:1-4)

This is also the consistent and binding teaching of the Catholic faith.  For example, Pope Leo XIII teaches in Immortale Dei:

To despise legitimate authority, in whomsoever vested, is unlawful, as a rebellion against the divine will, and whoever resists that, rushes willfully to destruction.  “He that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God, and they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.” To cast aside obedience, and by popular violence to incite to revolt, is therefore treason, not against man only, but against God.

Of course, this by no means entails that governmental authorities and police are not themselves sometimes guilty of injustice.  When they are, they must be punished accordingly and existing institutions reformed.  But that is very different from opposing coercive governmental power as such.  Hence, calls to “abolish the police” or “defundthe police,” the claim that “all cops are bastards,” and the like, are contrary to natural law, divine revelation, and indeed (as St. Paul and Pope Leo teach) the divine government itself.  They are not merely ill-advised, like this or that regulation or tax or foreign policy initiative.  They are subversive of the very social order.  Into the bargain, such rhetoric is gravely unjust to the majority of police officers, dehumanizes them and, predictably, has resulted in an increase in murders of police officers.  And the citizens for whose sake the insane defunding proposal would purportedly be implemented would in fact be harmed the most by it, and are overwhelmingly opposed to it.

Public officials who do not unequivocally reject such evil opinions, and especially those who positively sympathize with such opinions, act directly contrary to the most fundamental preconditions of a just social order.  They are ipso facto manifestly unfit for office.

Sedition

The leftist mobs who have, in the name of this anti-police position, been attacking governmental buildings and otherwise seeking confrontations with police are guilty of the grave sin of sedition.  (Some among the mainstream press have tried to pretend that this mob violence has been exaggerated, but the pretense has by now gotten too ridiculous even for them.)  Contrasting sedition with war in the usual sense (which involves conflict between different countries) and strife (which involves conflict between individuals), Aquinas characterizes it as follows:

Sedition may be said to denote either actual aggression, or the preparation for such aggression… when, to wit, a number of people make preparations with the intention of fighting… Sedition, in its proper sense, is between mutually dissentient parts of one people, as when one part of the state rises in tumult against another part… [S]edition is opposed to a special kind of good, namely the unity and peace of a people...

A seditious man is one who incites others to sedition, and since sedition denotes a kind of discord, it follows that a seditious man is one who creates discord, not of any kind, but between the parts of a multitude.  And the sin of sedition is not only in him who sows discord, but also in those who dissent from one another inordinately…

Sedition is contrary to the unity of the multitude, viz. the people of a city or kingdom… Wherefore it is evident that the unity to which sedition is opposed is the unity of law and common good: whence it follows manifestly that sedition is opposed to justice and the common good.  Therefore by reason of its genus it is a mortal sin, and its gravity will be all the greater according as the common good which it assails surpasses the private good which is assailed by strife.

Accordingly the sin of sedition is first and chiefly in its authors, who sin most grievously; and secondly it is in those who are led by them to disturb the common good.  Those, however, who defend the common good, and withstand the seditious party, are not themselves seditious, even as neither is a man to be called quarrelsome because he defends himself.  (Summa Theologiae II-II.42.1-2)

Let’s note the various aspects of this account.  First, sedition involves one part of a society putting itself into a state of war with another part, by attacking the unity, peace, law, and common good of that society.  The left-wing rioters have done exactly this.  They do not seek to work within the legal and institutional framework they share with their fellow citizens.  Rather, they condemn that framework as inherently racist and therefore illegitimate, and anyone who upholds it as complicit in oppression.  Hence they boldly violate the laws by destroying public property, looting, burning down businesses, and even taking over whole city blocks.  They routinely resort to other forms of intimidation, such as forming mobs outside of private homes, harassing people in restaurants and other public spaces, doxing their opponents and seeking to make them unemployable, and so on.  And in some cases they boldly attack governmental buildings and police themselves, not in the way ordinary criminals do (merely as a means of avoiding capture and punishment for other crimes), but precisely as acts of insurrection, as attacks on the state itself. 

Second, Aquinas tells us that it is not merely those who actually engage in violence who are guilty of sedition.  Those who merely prepare for such conflict are guilty of it too, as indeed are even those who simply “dissent… inordinately” from their fellow citizens.  Anti-police activists who show up at protests armed with shields, helmets, bats, fireworks, lasers, pepper spray, etc. – and in some cases guns – are obviously preparing for violent confrontation.  Aquinas’s term “inordinately” is a bit vague, but I submit that someone who thinks that the basic institutions of American society are sodeeply and irredeemably evil that any fellow citizen who disagrees with that judgment is worthy of being doxed, publicly hounded, made unemployable, etc. “dissents inordinately” from his fellow citizens.

Third, as Aquinas says, those who “withstand the seditious party, are not themselves seditious,” any more than a person defending himself or others against attack can justly be called an aggressor.  Now, it certainly does not follow that armed vigilantism is morally unproblematic or advisable.  In general, it is not.  But it is ridiculous to pretend, as some have, that those who have stood up to the rioters are themselves somehow morally on a par with them, especially in contexts where local governments have refused to suppress the riots themselves. 

But whatabout…

Now, Aquinas also goes on to say that armed resistance to a tyrant can be legitimate, and that “consequently there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind” (Summa Theologiae II-II.42.2).  Does that mean that left-wing violence is justifiable after all, given that Donald Trump has violated “democratic norms,” as his critics are always piously averring every time he tweets out some trash talk?

The very idea is preposterous on its face.  Say what you will about Trump, he is not literally a tyrant.  He has no more power than other presidents have had, and his will, like theirs, has frequently been thwarted by Congress, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy.  He is in so weak a position that he will be lucky if he’s able barely to squeak out an Electoral College victory against a mediocrity in cognitive decline.  You can criticize Trump as loudly, harshly, and frequently as you wish, will be widely and openly praised for doing so, and Trump himself will do nothing in response but send out a nasty tweet or two.  Twitter mobs will not get you fired from your job, and in-person mobs will not descend on your home, harass you in public places, or loot and burn down your business.  (The people who engage in and get away with this kind of thuggish behavior are all criticsof Trump.)  It is supporters of Trump, and not his critics, who are most likely to find that they have to keep their views to themselves for fear of retaliation.  A tyrant would see in the coronavirus crisis and lockdowns an ideal “national emergency” pretext for increasing his power.  Instead, Trump has resisted lockdowns and is constantly accused of minimizing the threat of the virus.  A tyrant would use the riots as an excuse to impose martial law.  Instead, Trump has mainly confined himself to photo ops and tweeting out the phrase “Law and Order!”  Rather than doubling down on the federal presence in Portland in order to repel the lunatics who have besieged the courthouse there for months, his administration pulled the federal agents out.  Some “tyranny”!

Nor does the latest lame excuse for pearl-clutching lend any credence to the “tyranny” charge.  Even if Trump had really meant to say that he will not give up power if he loses the election – which he clearly did not mean – there is zero chance that the federal bureaucracy in general, the military in particular, or even his own party would support him.  (Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks that Trump would try to “steal” the election and that if it is close Biden “should not concede under any circumstances” were not met with similar horror by the pearl-clutchers – even though what she meant was essentially the same thing that Trump meant.)

Furthermore, even if Trump really did have tyrannical designs, that would not justify the violence of the woke mob in the least.  For one thing, as Aquinas writes, a tyrannical government can be legitimately resisted by force “unlessindeed the tyrant's rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant's government” (Summa Theologiae II-II.42.2, emphasis added).  Those whose businesses have been looted and burned down by rioters have suffered far more from them than from anything Trump has done.  Nor can violent resistance to a tyrant be justified when there are peaceful alternatives – elections, recourse to the courts, etc.

Then there is the fact that, for the most part, it has not been federal agents that the rioters have been attacking but local police under the authority of left-wing local governments.  It isn’t really Trump that these people are attacking.  It is lawful authority as such that they are attacking.  They are engaged in sedition pure and simple, and as a matter of basic justice such action should be put down by governing authorities with whatever force is necessary.  Governing authorities who refuse to do so and even minimize and excuse these actions thereby facilitate sedition.  That is, I submit, far more contrary to “democratic norms” than anything Trump has done.

Factional tyranny

When we hear the word “tyranny,” we are inclined to think of a single individual despot, but as Aquinas makes clear, that is by no means the only kind of tyranny, nor the worst kind.  In De Regno, Book I, Chapter 2, he writes:

If an unjust government is carried on by one man alone, who seeks his own benefit from his rule and not the good of the multitude subject to him, such a ruler is called a tyrant... If an unjust government is carried on, not by one but by several, and if they be few, it is called an oligarchy, that is, the rule of a few.  This occurs when a few, who differ from the tyrant only by the fact that they are more than one, oppress the people by means of their wealth.  If, finally, the bad government is carried on by the multitude, it is called a democracy, i.e. control by the populace, which comes about when the plebeian people by force of numbers oppress the rich.  In this way the whole people will be as one tyrant.

End quote.  So, on Aquinas’s account, a faction within society, or even the people as a whole, could rule in a tyrannical fashion.  Notice that he says that it is possible even for the common people to be perpetrators of oppression, not just victims of it; and that it is possible even for the rich to be victims of oppression, and not just perpetrators of it.  No one can claim that he has justice on his side merely because he belongs to a certain group within society, and no one can be accused of injustice merely because he belongs to some other group.

Aquinas says more about the nature of factional tyranny, in particular, in Book I, Chapter 6 of De Regno.  Indeed, he says that a “polyarchy” or equal rule of multiple individuals or competing interests is more likely to degenerate into tyranny than a monarchy is:

Group government [polyarchy] most frequently breeds dissension.  This dissension runs counter to the good of peace which is the principal social good.  A tyrant, on the other hand, does not destroy this good, rather he obstructs one or the other individual interest of his subjects – unless, of course, there be an excess of tyranny and the tyrant rages against the whole community.  Monarchy is therefore to be preferred to polyarchy, although either form of government might become dangerous…

Now, considerable dangers to the multitude follow more frequently from polyarchy than from monarchy.  There is a greater chance that, where there are many rulers, one of them will abandon the intention of the common good than that it will be abandoned when there is but one ruler.  When any one among several rulers turns aside from the pursuit of the common good, danger of internal strife threatens the group because, when the chiefs quarrel, dissension will follow in the people…

Moreover, in point of fact, a polyarchy deviates into tyranny not less but perhaps more frequently than a monarchy.  When, on account of there being many rulers, dissensions arise in such a government, it often happens that the power of one preponderates and he then usurps the government of the multitude for himself.  This indeed may be clearly seen from history.  There has hardly ever been a polyarchy that did not end in tyranny.

End quote.  Now, Aquinas suggests that “dissension” between the people of a society and “abandon[ment]…of the common good” are more likely with polyarchy than with a single tyrant.  Why would that be?  Here’s a way to think about it.  The classic individual despot is primarily concerned simply with staying in power for its own sake.  He will interfere with any actions among the citizenry that might pose a threat to that power.  But once it is secure he may be willing to advance the common good, even if only because it will facilitate his staying in power.  He may well rule pragmatically rather than ideologically, and in a way that is neutral between the interests of the various groups subject to him.

By contrast, a faction is typically concerned to secure power not for its own sake, but rather for the sake of advancing the interests of some group – a cabal of ideologues, an economic class, a tribal faction or ethnic group, a party, or what have you.  And such interests naturally tend to conflict with those of other groups.  Thus the dissension and abandonment of the common good that Aquinas speaks of.  And thus the greater tyranny.  It’s bad when some despot refuses to give up power, but leaves you alone as long as you don’t challenge him.  But it’s much worse when a one-party state wants to impose its ideological vision on the whole of society, or a tribal faction or ethnic group gains control and seeks to avenge its grievances against other such groups.  In the nature of the case, the common good is abandoned, and one faction simply attempts to impose its will on the others – not “from below,” as in sedition, but “from above” by way of the apparatus of state power.

Now, proposals that have become mainstream within the Democratic Party – including abolishing the Senate filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and eliminating the Electoral College – would, if implemented, effectively secure a one-party state and thus a factional tyranny.  Certainly they too entail far graver violations of “democratic norms” than anything Trump has done.

Court-packing amounts to an abandonment of even the pretense of interpreting the law rather than creating it by fiat.  True, both parties have increasingly tried to get onto the court people they hope will rule the way they want them to.  But because the parties have respected the precedent that the Court has no more than nine justices at any time, chance has played as much of a role as which party happens to hold power in determining who those justices will be.  If by chance a seat on the Court happens to be vacant because of death or resignation, and if a party holds the presidency, and if the president can get the Senate to confirm his candidate, only then can that party can get its candidate onto the Court.  Being neutral between the parties, chance has kept either party from being able entirely to make the court its plaything. 

Court-packing would eliminate that first, crucial element of chance.  It would allow the party that controls the presidency and the Senate to appoint as many justices as it needs to in order to ensure that the Court will decide that the Constitution says what the party wants it to say. 

The remaining elements of chance would be removed by the abolition of the Electoral College, along with other left-wing schemes in play, such as granting statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.  The Electoral College is a bulwark of subsidiarity and political moderation, and an obstacle to the tyranny of the majority.  It requires presidential candidates to take account of the diverse interests and circumstances of rural and urban localities, states with large populations and those with small ones, more traditional communities and more modern ones, and so forth.  Now, if presidential candidates had, for example, to appeal to mostly rural voters, it would be very difficult for a Democrat ever to win; whereas if they had to appeal to mostly urban voters, it would be difficult for a Republican ever to win.  But abolishing the Electoral College would create exactly that latter sort of situation, allowing the Democratic Party to win presidential elections and formulate policy by appealing primarily to the high-population urban centers where it is at its strongest, while largely ignoring the concerns and interests of the rest of the country.  That is a recipe for factional tyranny.

As Marc Thiessen points out, the Democrats could, through apportionment, effectively “pack” the House of Representatives as well, and thereby realize a one-party state by increasing their strength in the Electoral College (since the number of electors reflects the number of representatives) rather than abolishing it.  Granting statehood to D.C. and/or Puerto Rico, which would be Democratic strongholds, would also make it difficult or impossible for the Republicans ever again to control the Senate. 

And this is to say nothing about the intolerantand indeed totalitarianwoke ideology that is sweeping away more sober and liberal elements on the Left – the ideology that will determine how a Leftist one-party state will govern.

Again, these departures from democratic norms have become mainstream within the Democratic Party – so much so that, whether out of fear of alienating his base (who favor such proposals) or out of fear of alienating most voters (who don’tfavor them), Joe Biden refuses to tell us whether he will try to pack the Supreme Court or abolish the filibuster.  Without any protest from the mainstream press.  While they all accuse Trump of having dictatorial inclinations.

Hammer and anvil

The toleration of sedition and other trends which keep the population off-balance and demoralized are like an anvil, and the move toward ideological one-party rule like a hammer.  Distracted by the manifest failings of the sitting leader, the people do not see the greater evil that is coming down upon them once he is gone.  It all sounds so depressingly familiar.

Related posts:

The rule of lawlessness

Plato predicted woke tyranny

The popes against the revolution

Envy cancels justice

Aquinas contra globalism

In Book Two, Chapter 3 of his little work De Regno (or On Kingship), Thomas Aquinas addresses matters of trade and its effect on the material and spiritual well-being of a nation.  On the one hand, and at the end of the chapter, he allows that:

Trade must not be entirely kept out of a city, since one cannot easily find any place so overflowing with the necessaries of life as not to need some commodities from other parts.  Also, when there is an over-abundance of some commodities in one place, these goods would serve no purpose if they could not be carried elsewhere by professional traders.  Consequently, the perfect city will make a moderate use of merchants.

However, “moderate” is the key word here.  The bulk of the chapter is devoted to warnings about the negative effects of excessive reliance on trade.  Aquinas begins with the material harms it entails:

There are two ways in which an abundance of foodstuffs can be supplied to a city.  The first we have already mentioned, where the soil is so fertile that it amply provides for all the necessities of human life.  The second is by trade, through which the necessaries of life are brought to the town in sufficient quantity from different places.

It is quite clear that the first means is better.  The more dignified a thing is, the more self-sufficient it is, since whatever needs another’s help is by that fact proven to be deficient.  Now the city which is supplied by the surrounding country with all its vital needs is more self-sufficient than another which must obtain those supplies by trade.  A city therefore which has an abundance of food from its own territory is more dignified than one which is provisioned through trade.

It seems that self-sufficiency is also safer, for the import of supplies and the access of merchants can easily be prevented whether owing to wars or to the many hazards of the sea, and thus the city may be overcome through lack of food.

End quote.  In Aristotelian-Thomistic political philosophy, the state is the perfect society in the sense that it is complete in a way smaller social units are not.  For example, individual families and small villages are not able to provide for all of their needs, such as protection from invasion and the variety and amount of food they need.  That is why larger social formations, united into a state, are necessary.  But by the same token, a state that is less reliant on trade, especially for basic needs, is ipso facto more perfect or complete.  And this is evidenced by the fact that the breakdown of supply lines, the hostility of foreign powers, economic collapse elsewhere, etc. are bound to affect the well-being of a state that is highly dependent on trade more than that of a state that is not so dependent.

But Aquinas has even more to say about the moral and spiritual harms that tend to follow from an overreliance on trade.  Economic self-sufficiency, he writes:

is more conducive to the preservation of civic life.  A city which must engage in much trade in order to supply its needs also has to put up with the continuous presence of foreigners.  But intercourse with foreigners, according to Aristotle’s Politics, is particularly harmful to civic customs.  For it is inevitable that strangers, brought up under other laws and customs, will in many cases act as the citizens are not wont to act and thus, since the citizens are drawn by their example to act likewise, their own civic life is upset.

End quote.  A nation is not merely a population located in a certain geographical territory.  It is united by a common history, laws, mores, and culture, and disruptions to the latter therefore threaten its unity.  Aquinas thinks that “the continuous presence of foreigners” has a tendency to cause such disruption, especially insofar as citizens “are drawn by their example to act likewise,” i.e. to begin to act according to foreign norms and lose allegiance to those of their own nation.

This is related to a theme Aquinas develops elsewhere, in Summa Theologiae I-II.105.3.  Of ancient Israel, he observes, approvingly, that:

When any foreigners wished to be admitted entirely to their fellowship… a certain order was observed.  For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations, as the Philosopher says (Polit. iii, 1).  The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might attempt something hurtful to the people.

The principle here is that becoming part of a nation is, again, not merely a matter of entering into the population of some geographical territory.  It also involves making one’s own the common history, laws, mores, and culture of that nation – joining the extended family, as it were.  Until that happens with an incoming population, it cannot, in Aquinas’s view, be sure to have the nation’s “common good firmly at heart.” 

What these passages from Aquinas imply is that too free a flow of populations across borders tends to dilute allegiance to the shared norms and culture of a nation, and thus threatens national unity.  For, on the side of citizens, out of deference to foreigners they will become less attached to those norms and that culture, and thus less attached to their own nation; and on the side of foreigners, they will feel less incentive to adopt or respect the norms and culture themselves, and thus less likely to assimilate to the extended family.

So, in Aquinas’s view, excessive reliance on trade threatens the material well-being and unityof a nation.  A third danger concerns the moral character of a nation.  As he writes in the same section of De Regno:

Again, if the citizens themselves devote their life to matters of trade, the way will be opened to many vices.  Since the foremost tendency of tradesmen is to make money, greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade.  The result is that everything in the city will become venal; good faith will be destroyed and the way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit, despising the public good; the cultivation of virtue will fail since honour, virtue’s reward, will be bestowed upon the rich.  Thus, in such a city, civic life will necessarily be corrupted.

In other words, a nation excessively concerned with commerce will begin to approximate Plato’s conception of oligarchy, i.e. a society dominated by souls oriented primarily to the pursuit of wealth.  Not only does this foster the vice of greed, it also leads to a general decadence.  Aquinas observes that “tradesmen, not being used to the open air and not doing any hard work but enjoying all pleasures, grow soft in spirit.” 

In Book Two, Chapter 4 of De Regno, Aquinas considers the topic of decadence at length.  On the one hand, he acknowledges that “since the life of man cannot endure without enjoyment,” a city needs to be pleasant.  As he says at the end of the chapter, “in human intercourse it is best to have a moderate share of pleasure as a spice of life, so to speak, wherein man’s mind may find some recreation.”  However, what he emphasizes is that when citizens become too concerned with pleasure-seeking, “this is most harmful to a city.”  He develops the theme as follows:

In the first place, when men give themselves up to pleasure their senses are dulled, since this sweetness immerses the soul in the senses so that man cannot pass free judgment on the things which cause delight.  Whence, according to Aristotle’s sentence, the judgment of prudence is corrupted by pleasure.

Again, indulgence in superfluous pleasure leads from the path of virtue, for nothing conduces more easily to immoderate increase which upsets the mean of virtue, than pleasure.  Pleasure is, by its very nature, greedy, and thus on a slight occasion one is precipitated into the seductions of shameful pleasures just as a little spark is sufficient to kindle dry wood; moreover, indulgence does not satisfy the appetite for the first sip only makes the thirst all the keener.  Consequently, it is part of virtue’s task to lead men to refrain from pleasures.  By thus avoiding any excess, the mean of virtue will be more easily attained.

Also, they who give themselves up to pleasures grow soft in spirit and become weak-minded when it is a question of tackling some difficult enterprise, enduring toil, and facing dangers…

Finally, men who have become dissolute through pleasures usually grow lazy and, neglecting necessary matters and all the pursuits that duty lays upon them, devote themselves wholly to the quest of pleasure, on which they squander all that others had so carefully amassed.  Thus, reduced to poverty and yet unable to deprive themselves of their wonted pleasures, they do not shrink from stealing and robbing in order to have the wherewithal to indulge their craving for pleasure.

End quote.  So, Aquinas notes, first, that pleasure can overwhelm the mind to such an extent that, the more devoted one is to pleasure-seeking, the less “critical distance” one has on the pleasures one enjoys.  One is less able to think reasonably or prudently about them.  (As Aquinas emphasizes elsewhere, this is especially so with pleasure taken in sexual immorality, which has a tendency to blind the intellect.)  Second, the more one is inclined to pleasure-seeking in general, the more likely one is to fall into immoral pleasures (as opposed to licit pleasures pursued excessively).  For indulgence tends to increase rather than satisfy the appetite, making one more willing to “push the envelope” in order to sustain the same level of pleasure.  Third, people excessively concerned with pleasure-seeking become soft and unable to face problems manfully.  Finally, they tend also to be wasteful with wealth, and unscrupulous with regard to the means by which they would secure their pleasures.

Though Aquinas does not draw the connection in chapter 4, a commerce-oriented society is bound to be a pleasure-seeking society, given that it will be appetitive and will have the wealth to indulge its appetites.  To the extent that excessive reliance on trade makes a society more commerce-oriented, then, it will thereby in turn make it also more pleasure-oriented.

Going back to chapter 3, we can note that Aquinas adduces one final consideration against excessive reliance on trade:

Finally, that city enjoys a greater measure of peace whose people are more sparsely assembled together and dwell in smaller proportion within the walls of the town, for when men are crowded together it is an occasion for quarrels and all the elements for seditious plots are provided.  Hence, according to Aristotle’s doctrine, it is more profitable to have the people engaged outside the cities than for them to dwell constantly within the walls.  But if a city is dependent on trade, it is of prime importance that the citizens stay within the town and there engage in trade.  It is better, therefore, that the supplies of food be furnished to the city from its own fields than that it be wholly dependent on trade.

End quote.  In short, excessive orientation toward trade concentrates people in cities and thereby leads to greater social strife than would exist if people were more dispersed.

What would Aquinas think of contemporary politicians and business leaders who treat commerce and pleasure-seeking as the primary social goods, enact trade agreements that undermine domestic manufacturing, implement policies favorable to multinational corporations and economic globalization, encourage multiculturalism and disdain national loyalties, favor loose immigration controls or even open borders, and take interest only in major metropolitan centers and regard the rest of the nation as “flyover country”?  Would he regard them as fit to govern their fellow citizens, according to the principles of De Regno? 

Related posts:

The virtue of patriotism

John Paul II in defense of the nation and patriotism

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism

The rule of lawlessness

As Aristotle and Aquinas teach us, human beings are by nature rational social animals.  Because we are a kind of animal, we need to be safe from violent attack and we need the freedom to acquire food, shelter, clothing and other material goods and to be able to rely on stable possession of them.  Because we are social animals, we need the cooperation of others in order to acquire these material goods, and we also need the warmth of human relationships and a sense of belonging and loyalty to a larger whole – to a family, a community, a nation.  Because we are rational animals, we need for others to appeal to our reason in order to persuade us of their opinions and favored policies, rather than resorting to intimidation and violence.

These are basichuman goods insofar as they are the necessary preconditions of other goods, and the fundamental duty of government is to safeguard these basic goods.  It must do so in a way that respects the natural law principle of subsidiarity, according to which it is a grave injustice for the state to take over from lower-level social orders (such as the family) what they can do for themselves.  And it must do so in a way that respects the rule of law.  The rule of law is not the same thing as the arbitrary will of some legislator, but precisely the opposite of that.  True law must reflect rationality both in its motivation and in its effects.  A decree that has no consistent rationale or application, or which makes the social order unpredictable or otherwise unstable, smacks of tyranny rather than lawfulness.  As Aquinas writes:

In order that the volition of what is commanded may have the nature of law, it needs to be in accord with some rule of reason.  And in this sense is to be understood the saying that the will of the sovereign has the force of law; otherwise the sovereign's will would savor of lawlessness rather than of law.  (Summa Theologiae I-II.90.1)

And of tyranny he says:

Everything is uncertain when there is a departure from justice.  Nobody will be able firmly to state: This thing is such and such, when it depends upon the will of another, not to say upon his caprice. (On Kingship, Book I, Chapter 4)

Protecting these basic goods of human beings as rational social animals, in a way that respects subsidiarity and the rule of law, is the foundation of true social justice as it is understood in the natural law tradition and in Catholic moral theology.  Any regime that imperils these basic goods is fundamentally socially unjust.  And any regime that imperils them in the name of social justice is not only unjust, but diabolically perverse.

New world disorder

Now, the last few months have seen the sudden rise of a strange new order of things (or rather a disorder of things) that imperils all of these basic goods.  It has three main components:

(1) Open-ended stop-and-start lockdowns imposed in the name of public health that are unnecessary, excessive in the material and spiritual costs they impose on citizens, and arbitrary in their application;

(2) The refusal of many public officials to suppress widespread rioting, vandalism, and looting, conjoined with their seriously entertaining (and in some cases actively working to implement) the dismantling of ordinary police protections; and

(3) The spread throughout news media, entertainment, educational institutions, corporate Human Resources departments, and governmental agencies of a Maoist-style “cancel culture” that shrilly insists on a simplistic and divisive Manichean ideology, and tries to shout down and otherwise harass dissenters and make them infamous and unemployable. 

This confluence of trends endangers the vast majority of citizens, particularly the poor and the middle class and small business owners.  It has little effect on the super-rich and large corporations, who have the resources to shield themselves from the worst effects of economic disruption and social chaos.  So, who benefits from it?  Mainly two groups: (a) revolutionaries and other lawbreakers who profit from the breakdown in social order, and (b) governmental officials and corporate bureaucrats (such as HR personnel looking to ferret out insufficiently “woke” employees) seeking to expand their discretionary power over others.  In other words, it benefits the tyrannical personality type described by Plato, which preys upon society from below (in the case of criminals and revolutionaries) and from above (in the case of ideologues in positions of power).  The law-abiding public is caught between these two groups, as in a vise.  Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, what we are seeing with some of these trends is eerily reminiscent of what Plato describes in the Republic as the classic mechanism by which democracy degenerates into tyranny. 

Let’s consider each of these trends and how they threaten the basic human goods I described above.

Lawless lockdowns

No doubt some readers have already had to wipe spittle flecks off of their computer screens, outraged at the very suggestion that the lockdowns might be in any way questionable.  Such knee-jerk attitudes are precisely part of the problem I have in mind.  I do not deny that COVID-19 is a serious problem, and I do not deny that many of the measures taken to deal with it (social distancing, the wearing of masks in public, etc.) are reasonable.  I also do not deny that the initial lockdown was justifiable as a way of keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed – indeed, I defended it.  (Though in hindsight, it was vain to hope that public officials would be willing to close that particular Pandora’s Box once the public allowed them to open it.)

It simply doesn’t follow, though, that lockdowns were necessary or justifiable beyond that, and it is foolish either flatly to assert that “Lockdowns work!” or to pretend that shouting “Science!” suffices to justify them.  To take the latter point first, whether lockdowns are a good idea or not is not a purely scientific question.  In addition to the epidemiological considerations, there are questions about the effects lockdowns have on people’s livelihoods and life savings, their repercussions for health-related issues other than COVID-19, the psychological costs of lockdowns, their effects on education, questions about the circumstances under which it is ethically permissible to impose such huge burdens on citizens, questions about the effects of lockdowns on social and political stability, and so on.  Epidemiologists and physicians have no special expertise on most of these matters.  Resolving them is the task of the statesman (Aristotle’s politikos) – not the natural scientist, whose role is merely to provide expert but fallible advice on some aspects of the question.  To pretend otherwise is scientism, not science.

For another thing, “Do lockdowns work?” is the wrong question.  Yes, considered in the abstract, keeping someone shut up in his house makes it less likely that he is going to catch or spread the virus.  But of course, it also makes it less likely that he is going to be involved in a car accident that kills either himself or another person, and it makes it less likely that he is either going to murder someone or be murdered.  But no one thinks that lockdowns might be a good way to reduce the incidence of traffic fatalities or murder until such time as we can improve traffic safety and criminal justice.  So, it would be quite silly to think the obvious fact that, in the abstract, we are “safer at home” by itself proves anything. 

There is also the fact that, as I have argued before, lockdowns involve actions that, under ordinary circumstances, would be gravely unjust.  Human beings have a natural right to labor in order to provide for themselves and their families.  They have a natural right to gather together for religious worship.  They have a natural right to decide how best to educate their children.  They have a natural right to the liberty of action involved in ordinary day-to-day social activities.  They have a natural right to the stability and predictability necessary for long-range planning, which the rule of law is supposed to guarantee.  Interference with these normal human activities and goods causes grave harm.  Hence, while they can in principle be temporarily suspended when absolutely necessary in an emergency, there is a strong presumption against this.  The burden of proof is always on governmentto demonstrate that interference with these goods is strictly necessary, and not on citizens to show that such interference is unnecessary.

So, again, “Do lockdowns work?” is the wrong question.  The right question is: “Do we know with moral certainty that lockdowns are strictly necessary to prevent the potential harms of the virus, and that those harms are greater than the aggregate of harms that the lockdowns themselves cause?”  And I submit that we know no such thing, and that continued lockdowns are, accordingly, unjustifiable and tyrannical. 

Those who are in serious danger from the virus are the elderly and those with serious preexisting medical conditions, and not the general population.  And it is certainly not a serious threat to the young.  Hence, in order to justify general lockdowns and the closing of schools, at the very least we would have to be morally certain that quarantining only those who are in serious danger, together with less draconian measures for the general population (social distancing, masks, etc.), would not be sufficient.  Note that it is not good enough to respond that those at special risk might catch the virus from others who are out and about in the general population.  For that is already the case even given the lockdowns that have occurred (where grocery stores, hardware stores, and the like were not shut down).  So, what we would have to be morally certain of is that shutting down so-called non-essential businesses and schools is strictly necessary, when we’re already letting lots of businesses stay open.

Yet there is simply no evidencethat lockdowns are strictly necessary for bringing about the results desired, nor even strong evidence that they are particularly effective in doing so.  Sweden opted to pursue herd immunity rather than imposing draconian lockdowns, and while it had more deaths than some countries that imposed them, it had fewer deaths than other countries that did.  Despite its large elderly population and densely packed cities, Japan kept its death rate low without a lockdown.  Public health experts like Johan Giesecke, John Ioannides, and Sunetra Gupta have long been arguing that the hoped-for benefits of lockdowns do not outweigh the known harms.  Recently, Greg Ip has usefully summarized their costs, and Donald Luskin the lack of statistical correlation between lockdowns and improved outcomes vis-à-vis COVID-19.  The most widely publicized COVID deaths – those of thousands of elderly people – resulted, not from the absence of lockdowns, but from the policy of some states of sending infected people back into nursing homes.  Meanwhile, it is precisely the poor and otherwise vulnerable who have suffered the most from lockdowns.

The defender of lockdowns will insist that all of this doesn’t prove that lockdowns aren’t necessary, but the burden of proof isn’t on me or anyone else in the first place to prove that they aren’t.  The burden is on the defender to prove that they are necessary, and to do so with moral certainty.  Absent such proof, governments have no business destroying ordinary people’s livelihoods and life savings and ability to educate their children and to plan for the future – nor any business papering over the true costs they are imposing by pretending that it is only some abstraction called “the economy,” rather than flesh-and-blood human beings, that they are harming.  Absent such proof, this destruction is tyrannical– it is government causing grave and unjust harm to its citizens rather than protecting them from it.

Abetting anarchy

If there were any doubt that the government officials most enamored of lockdowns were not acting with wisdom and justice, it was dispelled by their reaction to the protests and rioting that began two months into the lockdown. 

For one thing, many of the same officials who sternly forbade large gatherings, on the grounds that they posed a grave public health hazard, suddenly tolerated or even encouraged such gatherings when the political cause that motivated them was one the officials sympathized with.  The justification given for this double standard was that the cause of fighting police brutality was no less a matter of public health than COVID-19 is. 

But this is rank sophistry.  First, prior to the protests, lockdown defenders were assuring us that assembling in large crowds and thereby facilitating spread of the virus threatened innocent lives, and was even tantamount to murder.  So how is doing something tantamount to murder a good way to protest murder, or to prevent further murders?

Second, the number of people who die in police shootings annually is nowhere remotely close to the number who have died from COVID-19.  In the United States, police kill about 1,000 people a year – that’s allkillings, including the ones that no one claims were unjustifiable.  Meanwhile, so far over 190,000 deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to COVID-19 this year.  So, if your interest is in saving as many innocent lives as possible (as lockdown defenders claim theirs is), then how can you justify doing something that risks a vastly larger number of innocent lives in the name of protesting something that risks fewer of them?

Third, many of the protests degenerated into riots, and riots themselves pose threats to innocent lives, not to mention the property and livelihoods of innocent people.

So, their response to the protests all by itself demonstrates that those public officials who have pushed lockdowns the hardest do not have good judgment.  But far worse even than that was their response to the riots, vandalism, and looting that some of the protests gave way to – which many of these public officials took no significant action to prevent, and which some even tried to excuse or put a positive spin on. 

Here too the justifications given were manifest sophistries.  They amounted to arguments like: “Person A unjustly killed Person B; therefore it is defensible (or at least excusable, or understandable) for Person C to loot and burn down Person D’s business.”  Moreover, those who suffer most from rioting and looting are the minority communities that these public officials claim to be most concerned for.  Even worse than that, some of these same public officials have expressed sympathy for, and even tried to implement, calls to “defund the police” – this despite the fact that the minority communities they claim to be concerned for are, like the public in general, overwhelmingly opposed to this insane policy. 

Hence, here is what we canknow with moral certainty.  Public officials who refuse to defend innocent people from rioters, looters, and vandals, and who even entertain the idea of removing police protection from them, cannot be trusted to make sound judgments about lockdowns, or pretty much anything else for that matter.  They manifestly do not have the best interests of law-abiding citizens at heart, and/or lack even rudimentary common sense.  And occasionally, the mask drops and their true concerns are revealed.

It is difficult to overstate the gravity of what has been happening, for it is far worse and more diabolical than the ordinary corruption of which politicians are often guilty.  A corrupt politician breaks the law himself, but nevertheless typically keeps the law in place, pays lip service to it, and even upholds it when others break it.  But what we are seeing with this one-two punch of arbitrary lockdowns and tolerance of criminality is the subversion of the most basic function of government.  Governments have themselves been directly causing grave harm to the livelihoods and businesses of innocent citizens, and then have refused to defend those citizens when criminals and anarchists looted and burned down those businesses, and thereby destroyed those livelihoods.  Law-abiding citizens are punished and their protections removed, while lawbreakers are treated with kid gloves and their criminality is facilitated.  This is perverse, the direction of government toward what is positively contrary to its fundamental purpose under natural law.  It is government undermining rather than upholding the basic preconditions of the social order.

Empowering ideologues

If lockdowns threaten the material goods we need as a kind of animal, and anarchy threatens the goods we need as social animals, the “cancel culture” and the “woke” ideologues pushing it threaten the goods we need as rational social animals. 

They do so, first of all, in their methods, insofar as they shamelessly deploy elementary logical fallacies as their basic mode of engagement with those they disagree with.   For example, they routinely assert simplistic slogans unbacked by argument, and sweepingly dismiss opposing views as “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” or otherwise “bigoted” – where whether such characterizations are fair, and whether the slogans are true, is precisely what is at issue between the wokesters and their critics (so that the wokesters are routinely guilty of the fallacy of begging the question). 

They routinely question the motives of their opponents rather than addressing their arguments, dismiss them as “racists,” “bigots,” etc., and dissuade others from paying them heed by way of mockery (the fallacies of appeal to motive, abusive ad hominem, and appeal to ridicule).  They relentlessly distort the views of their opponents, putting on them the most sinister and uncharitable interpretations possible (the straw man fallacy).  And needless to say, they can barely utter a sentence without committing a fallacy of appeal to emotion.

Worst of all, they try to intimidate their opponents into silence by stirring up Twitter mobs against them, doxing them, working to get them fired from their jobs, making them infamous and unemployable, and so forth (the fallacy of appeal to force). 

Of course, most human beings are prone to committing such fallacies from time to time, especially in political contexts.  What is new and different about “cancel culture” is that it represents a mass movement that has self-consciously adopted these tactics as a method for securing political victories and social change.  And the tactics reflect, not the occasional lapses of rationality to which we are all prone, but ideologies that reject the very idea of neutral and dispassionate rational discourse.  Political conflict is interpreted as essentially a war of wills between competing identity groups or economic interests, rather than an honest disagreement between minds sharing a common set of basic assumptions and standards of argumentation.  Accordingly, the desired outcome is interpreted as the imposition of one’s own will (or the will of one’s interest group) on the other, rather than the persuasion of fellow rational agents via argument.

Hence, the wokester or Social Justice Warrior tends, I would suggest, to be of what I have elsewhere called the “voluntarist personality type.”  And the dulling of his reason and content of his opinions tend, I would argue, to have two deeper sources, the envy characteristic of the egalitarian ideologue and the blindness of mind of those deeply enmeshed in sexual vice.   As Plato warns us in the Republic, egalitarian envy and disordered sexual desire are the seeds from which tyranny grows within the late stages of a democracy. 

In any event, what we find in “cancel culture” are several of what Aquinas characterizes as sins against the peace of a community, such as discordand strife.  And in both its content and the inspiration it gives to the rioters, vandals, and looters, it also manifests the sins of seditionand of hatred of one’s own country.  For instance, it demonizes the United States and its institutions as wicked to their very foundations, on the basis of crackpot historical claims that serious historians (including left-wing historians) have debunked.  And on the basis of crackpot social science, it sows hatred and paranoia by demonizing an entire race as so deeply permeated by evil that its members are unaware that everything they say and do manifests that evil.  (Some left-wing critics have pointed out the essentially “Hitlerian” character of these so-called “anti-racist” theories, the only difference from Nazi ideology being which race is demonized.)  Such calumnies divide citizens into inherently hostile camps, provide a rationalization for extremism and violence, and render impossible the compromise, good will, and solidarity that a stable political order requires.

And once again, the same government officials most favorable toward lockdowns, and least inclined to put a stop to rioting, vandalism, and looting, and are also the least inclined to criticize “cancel culture” and its excesses.  Do the math.

Plato the prophet

The sudden and dramatic disruption of the preconditions of everyday social life represented by these three trends has, unsurprisingly, had as its sequel an alarming increase in general anxiety and despair.  But that merely accelerated a trend that already existed due to the more gradual breakdown in the fundamental social institution, the family.  That breakdown is also the true root cause of the povertyand crimethat underlie contemporary social unrest.  And of course, the breakdown of the family is in turn due primarily to the Sexual Revolution. 

Now, liberals and those further to the Left have more or less been in agreement on the Sexual Revolution, and happy to go along with its destruction of the restraints on desire that have traditionally safeguarded the stability of the family.  The difference is that liberals nevertheless wanted to preservethe stability of bourgeois financial and political institutions.  This was the Clintonian Democrat/socially liberal Republican “bourgeois bohemian” dream: You can have your sexual license and a safe neighborhood, a flourishing 401(k), and some flag-waving too. 

But the woke Left, which is now pushing aside the liberals, wants to tear it all down – the family, the market economy, police, patriotism, and the rule of law, which it would replace with the rule of ever-evolving woke diktat.  The liberals are “nice nihilists,” to borrow a phrase from Alex Rosenberg.  The woke Left, not so nice.  Liberals, like termites hollowing out the inside of a tree, destroyed the core social institution of the family.  And now the wokesters want to blast away the empty outward husk too.  There is in them a complete sickness of soul, an unquenchable lust for destruction, that is reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Demons, Nietzsche’s tarantulas, or Plato’s tyrannical man. 

Again, I have argued elsewhere that Plato’s analysis illuminates our current situation.  Recall his classification of five basic types of political order, and the way they reflect different character types or conditions of the soul.  The human psyche, Plato tells us, has three parts: the rational part, the spirited part (the part of us that is moved by considerations of honor and shame), and the appetites.  The well-ordered soul is one in which the rational part is in charge and the spirited part is its ally in keeping the appetites in check.  A disordered soul is one in which this order of things is upended in one of several ways, some of them worse than others.  The best political regime is one in which the well-ordered soul is honored, and those possessed of it are in charge.  The four bad regimes, each worse than the preceding one, are those which are dominated by increasingly more disordered souls.

In particular, the ideal regime in Plato’s account is, of course, the reign of philosopher-kings, who are not just any old type of philosopher but, specifically, those committed to a broadly Platonic metaphysics and ethics.  Again, this is analogous to the kind of soul in which reason dominates the spirited part and the appetites, and it is the kind of society in which that kind of soul is idealized.  Its ideal human being would be the man who has forsaken the cares of the world for the contemplation of eternal truth and mystical union with the Form of the Good.

The second kind of regime – bad compared to the reign of the philosopher-kings, but the least bad of the unjust political orders – is timocracy.  The character type that predominates in this kind of society is one in which the spirited part of the soul is dominant.  The military man, rather than the Platonic philosopher, is its ideal, and virtues like courage and self-sacrifice are the ones most honored.  Because it puts honor above the disinterested pursuit of truth, it is inferior to the reign of the philosopher-kings.  But because it nevertheless subordinates the pull of the appetites to considerations of honor and shame, it retains a measure of nobility.

The third kind of regime is oligarchy, by which Plato essentially has in mind the sort of society oriented toward commerce and the accumulation of wealth.  The character type that dominates it, and which it idealizes, is the capitalist.  This sort of regime is inferior to timocracy, and much inferior to the reign of the philosopher-kings, because the appetites have now come to dominate society and those who govern it.  However, the disorder of the soul is still not complete in an oligarchy, because accumulating and securing wealth requires putting some check on the appetites.  Hence oligarchies will honor bourgeois virtues like thrift, the delaying of gratification, regard for law and order, and concern for respectability.  Oligarchic man is stolid even if not terribly inspiring or noble. 

The fourth kind of regime is democracy, by which Plato has in mind the sort of society that prizes freedom and equality above all else.  In particular, its tendency is to regard every desire and every way of life as equally good, and to resent any suggestion that some desires and ways of life are bad or even inferior to others.  “Do your own thing” is its ethos, and tolerance is its most prized virtue.  The character type that prevails in this sort of society is one so dominated by appetite that even the bourgeois virtues of the oligarch are gradually undermined.  Relativism and irrationalism also become prevalent, because the very idea of objective standards of goodness and truth becomes odious to egalitarian man.

The only thing worse than that sort of society, in Plato’s view, is the kind it tends to degenerate into, which is tyranny.  In a certain kind of soul within egalitarian society, the dominance of appetite and resentment of social constraints become so overwhelming that it is not satisfied with being left alone to do its own thing.  It wants to impose itself on others.  The laid back hippie becomes the bitter revolutionary, and “free love and free stuff” something to be secured by the ammo box rather than the ballot box.  For Plato, tyranny is not the opposite of democracy as he understands it, but its culmination.

The Evil Party and the Stupid Party

See my recent American Mind articlefor more on Plato’s analysis, and in particular on why he thinks there is a tendency for each kind of regime to give way over time to the next and worse kind.  Naturally, I wouldn’t endorse every detail of Plato’s political philosophy.  But the broad outlines of his analysis of the main types of regime and the character types they reflect are, I think, illuminating.  I would suggest that what we are seeing in current events may turn out to be something like the transition he described between democracy and tyranny.  And I think Plato’s analysis also sheds light on the nature of contemporary American politics more generally.

For most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both the Republican and Democratic parties have essentially been oligarchic, in Plato’s sense.  The difference between them, especially in recent decades, is this.  The Republicans have been more inclined to celebrate the military virtues and patriotism, so that there is in their view of things at least an echo of timocracy in Plato’s sense; and to the extent that they have also been more inclined to praise traditional religious belief and restraint on the appetites, there is even a faint echo of the otherworldliness of the philosopher-king.  Meanwhile, the Democrats have in recent decades become less comfortable with religion and patriotism, while at the same time enthusiastically championing the Sexual Revolution, feminism, and, in general, radical egalitarianism and liberation from traditional restraints on appetite.  Hence their trajectory has clearly been in the direction of democracyas Plato understands it; and insofar as in recent years they have begun flirting with outright socialism, there is even an echo of tyranny in Plato’s sense.  More than an echo, in the case of the wokesters. 

Republican senator Alan Simpson once famously said: “We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party.  I belong to the Stupid Party.”  I’ve long thought that that’s a pretty apt description of modern right- and left-wing political parties in general.  Naturally, I don’t mean that every right-winger is stupid or that every left-winger is evil.  But the general tendency of modern left-wing parties is to push us ever further in the trajectory of what the Platonic analysis would regard as social and political degeneracy.  And the general tendency of right-wing political parties has been to resist this trajectory, but in a way that is timid, inconsistent, incompetent, and at best only temporarily effective – and of course, in a way that rarely aims for anything higher than what Plato calls oligarchy, even if it resists the lower sorts of regime.  That is unsurprising, for the overall trajectory of modern Western society is itselfleftward and democratic in Plato’s sense.  And the trend is accelerating, and has worked its way into right-wing parties themselves.

Holding actions, half-hearted, badly implemented, barely effective, and bound to fail eventually, seem to be the best we can realistically hope for from politics for the foreseeable future.  What I said just over four years ago goes double now: Never has the Stupid Party been more stupid, or the Evil Party more evil.