https://jtcontracelsum.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-end-game-of-radical-individual.html Contra Celsum Wednesday, 2 November 2016
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Rod Dreher The American Conservative
Excerpts:
. . . the law is (generally) not crassly used for enrichment of the powerful, as you might think. That’s not my claim. My claim is this:
All law, aside from procedural and administrative law, is legislated morality. It embodies a particular view of the Good, of transcendent moral order.
The Christian moral order — or, if you like, the Judeo-Christian tradition as revealed in the Bible — has generally been the basis for our laws in the American tradition.
But this is no longer the case, not really. Our society has lost a genuinely Christian view of moral order. That’s not to say that the moral order is anti-Christian, necessarily, only that the extent to which it reflects a Christian view is incidental, given that contemporary American culture, especially elite legal culture (see below), has severed itself cleanly from its base in Christian morality and metaphysics. For better or for worse, this is the reality we’re living out.
Therefore, absent a transcendent basis for our laws, the law ceases to be something that attempts to mirror the divine order (that is, the law doesn’t point to a reality beyond itself), but rather becomes merely about manipulating things to achieve ends we choose [which can be ends that the elite choose for us].
Principled liberals are not cynical . . . . They genuinely believe they are pursuing the Good. The problem from a traditional Christian point of view is that the telos, the ultimate Good they are pursuing, is expanding individual autonomy, the sovereignty of the individual. [And that can bring about chaos and tyranny, see below.]
One law professor teaches a case...individuals have a right to sell their embryos. The professor said that the core of the jurisprudence here was based entirely on individual autonomy. He mentioned one student who rejected any system of legal reasoning that would fail to guarantee same-sex marriage. The professor said this kind of thinking is common among law students today. They’re not bad kids at all, he said; their moral imaginations have been formed by a culture that worships individual autonomy. We should not be surprised, then, that young lawyers and lawyers in training regard the law as an instrument to compel social progress, by their [personal] definition.
The Obergefell decision excludes an entire category of argument from the judicial process — specifically, Judeo-Christian arguments for how Creation works. From a Christian point of view, this is extremely problematic, and problematic in a way that many contemporary Christians don’t understand.
For orthodox Christians, Christianity is not simply a construal, that is, a complex set of opinions about how the world should be ordered. It is a revelation of how the world really is ordered. For example, to say that God created man and woman in His image is not simply a poetic expression...it embodies a profound anthropological and theological truth. Any law based on a contrary point of view is false, literally. And if those laws end up justifying practices (e.g., trade in human embryos), it might be evil.
Yesterday at the Tradition conference, a participant brought up Tocqueville’s position that liberal democracy depends on religion to form the character of the people, so that they are capable of self-rule. Adams, by the way, said this too, famously holding that our Constitution is only suitable for “a moral and religious people. Absent this, the unbridled passions of men would tear through our constitutional order “like a whale through a net.” The participant said that liberalism is not producing the kinds of people it needs to perpetuate itself. This point is explored at length by Patrick Deneen in this essay. Excerpts follow.
Liberalism claims that it merely describes our political, social, and private decision-making. Yet implicitly it was constituted as a constructive or normative project: What it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had to displace a very different form of human self-understanding and long-standing experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently about themselves and their relationships. Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not of any particular conception of the “Good.”
Yet liberalism is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible [interchangeable] and subject to constant redefinition, but so are all relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.
The second revolution...Premodern political thought—ancient and medieval, particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature to be part of a comprehensive natural order. Man was understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and so humanity was required to conform both to its own nature as well as, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which human beings were a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—thus, natural law—places upon human beings, and each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits, through the practice of virtues, in order to achieve a condition of human flourishing.
Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences, premised on the transformation of the view of human nature and on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. [This followed the Enlightenment, after 1650.]
More:
If my analysis is fundamentally accurate, liberalism’s endgame is unsustainable in every respect: It cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it continually provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back slowly but inexorably into a future in which extreme license invites extreme oppression.
The ancient claim that man is by nature a political animal and must, in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities, achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. Currently we lament and attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s idea of liberty, but not the deeper sources of those symptoms deriving from the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments.
If Deneen is right — and I believe he is — liberal democracy in this radically individualist, post-Christian culture will eventually devolve into tyranny because it cannot do otherwise. It is baked in the cake. Commenter Rob G., on yesterday’s Tradition conference post, said:
This tendency is exactly why Dostoevsky has Shigalyev say “Proceeding from unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism.” Radical individualism cannot help but eventually become some form of tyranny.
That’s from the novel Demons. Philosopher John Gray comments:
[Dostoevsky] was scornful of the ideas he found in St Petersburg when he returned from his decade of Siberian exile in 1854. The new generation of Russian intellectuals was gripped by European theories and philosophies. French materialism, German humanism and English utilitarianism were melded together into a peculiarly Russian combination that came to be called “nihilism.” They were fervent believers in science, who wanted to destroy the religious and moral traditions that had guided humankind in the past in order that a new and better world could come into being.
In contemporary America, we are nihilistic in a similar way. The core idea of the Enlightenment — that humans are not bound by religion, tradition, or any obligations not self-chosen — is, in the Dostoevskian sense, demonic. This is not going to end well.
How difficult it is to get students even to think beyond individual autonomy. One professor said it’s likely that the best thing we can do at this point is to educate our children in the kind of moral realism that is the antidote to the false religion of our time.
Posted by John Tertullian
Following 1798, Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge advocate the primacy of the individual over the community and foster a belief in the authenticity of individual vision over the conventions and formalities of institutions. For romantics and transcendentalists alike, all institutions — be they religious, social, political, or economic — are suspect as being false, materialistic, and deadening to an individual's pure insight. This will influence Emerson and Thoreau.
http://archives.eternitybiblecollege.com/2012/07/19/how-aristotle-messed-up-the-church/ Mark Beuving 2012
Aristotle gave people confidence that they didn’t need to look to God for the answers, they could find them through observing the objects around them.
Secularists say religion is important for your spiritual life, but everything else can be explained sufficiently through science. The church decided that there were two types of things in this world (spiritual things and natural things) and there were two separate ways of knowing those two types of things (revelation/faith and science).
Ultimately, this box we have allowed ourselves to be placed in has grown smaller and more constricting. The secular world grants us our faith, but we are told that it is a private matter. Faith belongs in our hearts, not our public discourse, our workplaces, or our politics. The amazing thing is that Christians have largely gone along with this.
Aristotle was a wise and fascinating man, but let’s not allow his influence to keep our Christian worldview sequestered off into the realm of private prayer. The Bible still speaks to every area of human existence. Nothing in creation makes sense apart from the Creator.