Ideology and globalism.
By Paul J Cella Posted in Culture — Comments (17) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Poor David Gelernter. I suppose he just cannot see the difficulties in his own argument, as exposed by his own argument. He cannot see that what is right in his argument overturns what is wrong. He cannot see that his most compelling polemics may be easily applied to him. He cannot see, in short, that he is arguing against himself.
The Democrats are not unpatriotic, but their patriotism is directed at a large abstract entity called The International Community or even (aping Bronze Age paganism) the Earth, not at America. Benjamin Disraeli anticipated this worldview long ago when he called Liberals the “Philosophical” and Conservatives the “National” party. Liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions — and seek harmony with the French and Germans. Conservatives are loyal to their own nation, and seek harmony with its Founders and heroes and guiding principles.
This is certainly true. The derailment of patriotism by ideology is one of the more prominent features of our age. Men delude themselves that ideas are countries, or countries ideas, and thus that patriotism is merely a sincere commitment to philosophical abstractions. But when Gelernter gets around to telling us how we should oppose the Liberal ideology, how to counter the derailment of patriotism, he can only offer another ideology:
Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can — to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.” Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson — and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs.
So really the charge against the Democrats is not their mania for abstractions, but that they adhere to the wrong ones. Their abstractions are not ambitious enough. Gelernter rightly argues that Liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions, but then he abstracts away any concrete substance from the America which is the proper object of loyalty.
Read on.
Gelernter rages against pacifism, appeasement, and globalism — a kind of unholy trinity of false abstractions. One is inclined to cheer him on in this, but the trouble is that his own theory is particularly vulnerable to the derailment he detests. The substitution of ideology for patriotism will always expose this vulnerability. Nor matter how vigorously he resists it in his case, ideology is inevitably subject to the whims of ideologists. His “Americanism” may be grounded in our “Founders and heroes and guiding principles,” and above all the Bible, but since it is still a mere “set of beliefs,” still primarily a matter of abstractions, it need not stay grounded in those admirable things. It can be captured by other abstractions. It can be hollowed out by miseducation. It can hijacked by intellectual fashion. It can be undermined by subversion.
There is an historical analogy that might help illuminate the problem. Early in Christian history a priest named Marcion was convinced that numerous excrescences on Holy Scripture were corrupting the faithful. He sought to reduce it to what he regarded as the pure gospel, undiluted by the narrative jumble of the Old Testament. According to the great historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Marcion’s object was to narrow the Christian Scripture down to a version of St. Luke’s gospel and St. Paul’s epistles. He sought a Christianity shorn of its Judaic influences. Encyclopedia Britannica 1911: “His undertaking thus resolved itself into a reformation of Christendom. This reformation was to deliver Christendom from false Jewish doctrines by restoring the Pauline conception of the gospel, — Paul being, according to Marcion, the only apostle who had rightly understood the new message of salvation as delivered by Christ.”
Marcion was excommunicated, labeled a heretic, and resisted with great vigor, by Christian thinkers from Justun Martyr to Tertullian to Clement of Alexandria. His heresy was defeated, though occasional attempts to revive his doctrine reach us now and then. One quixotic attempt was made by none other than Thomas Jefferson, who left us his version of the gospels, bereft of everything which could not be vindicated at the bar of Reason. It is fitting that Gelernter includes Jefferson in the ranks of his “biblical faith” of Americanism.
The opponents of Marcion were men of greater discernment: they recognized the danger of a purely intellectual Christian doctrine, a theology narrowed to its purest abstract essence and detached from the narrative history of Israel, and from the sacred polemics of the prophets. It is the danger of ideology, the danger of ungrounded speculation, of a faith fit only for intellectuals.
Not for nothing are the narrative portions of the Bible often the most beloved, especially by simple men lacking a taste for heavy theology. Christianity is perfectly inconceivable without them. They save us from the treachery of the human intellect; they provide ballast against the winds and waves of false abstraction.
Where do we find such ballast in the American tradition? We find it in our communities, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in the beauty of our land; we find it in our laws and our history; we find it even in our prejudices, or assumptions, in the questions we have closed and the others we stubbornly insist on keeping open. We find it many places, but not in the field of political speculation and abstraction. We find it not in a creed but in a way of life, a living tradition made not by intellectuals but by men and women living their lives in light of how their fathers lived theirs. We find it in America’s “democracy of the dead,” whereby we have refused to submit to that “arrogant oligarchy” of those who just “happened to be walking around,” but rather give votes “to that to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” “All democrats,” continues Chesterton is his famous passage, “object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
Gelernter tries mightily to embrace this sort of thing, a living tradition, but since his theory hinges eternally on abstractions, it must always remain an ideology. There is no real America in Americanism; it is America the abstraction. A mere “set of beliefs” cannot long hold a country together in this age of ideological fashion. We need more than that.
Our Liberals offer us their pitiful globalism, a universalism of pure platitudinous abstraction; but our right-Liberals, the “authorized” opposition, counter only with a variation on the same. It is globalism, alright, but led by Americans and informed by an abstracted abbreviation of our tradition. As Christopher Caldwell once wrote, letting the cat out of the bag as it were: “Some time before the end of the Iraq crisis, it will become clear that the US differs with Europe not over the need for post-national structures but over how those structures should be built. A nasty shock could be in store. By the time Europeans realise they do not have a monopoly on multilateral thinking, the US may already have come up with a more serviceable blueprint for a post-national order.” Namely, Americanism.
For the rest of us, a “post-national order” appears as what it always has to Conservatives: a monstrous tyranny in embryo. Over the past few years I have witnessed a really astonishing spectacle. North American politicians gather in negotiation to prepare these “post-national structures” here, most of them of economic-integration variety; populist Conservatives react with some annoyance; and mainstream right-wingers sneer at them! Quite as if the object lesson of the European Union were not right in front of our faces. In Europe, thanks to those grand post national structures, it is basically illegal to argue against Islam. A demonstration against the Jihad, scheduled for September 11, was first proscribed and then put down with brutal force. Statements like the following sentence have landed men in the dock: “Islam is a dangerous religion, and we ought to work actively to weaken it.” Such is the fruit of the Post-National Global Order.
In my reading, constitutional government, that is, real limited government, with efficacious mechanisms to check to aggrandizement of state over the individual, and which perseveres in the face all the rapacious schemes of the sophists and radicals, is a peculiarly evanescent achievement. In the modern age, outside of the British Isles and North America and a few other isolated places, it has hardly ever existed; in ancient times it was even rarer. Now, as the modern age comes to its miasmic and disordered end, we have influential people, many of them near to centers of power, who seem to fancy that this precious commodity, this delicate achievement assembled on a mass of human knowledge and wisdom astonishing in its range and profundity, can be simply imposed, following the effacement on that troublesome structure the nation-state, on the globe from the lofty heights of a world government. It does not strike me unreasonable to reply that such a project will merely mean the demise of constitutional government.
“The real American is all right,” wrote Chesterton. “It is the ideal American who is all wrong.” Mr. Caldwell’s vision of a post-national order, with Mr. Gelernter’s ideology as its guide, is an attempt to remake the world in the image of that ideal American. It is noteworthy that in this Post-National Global Order there is no room for patriots, only ideologues. Patriotism rooted in home and hearth, in actual places and actual people, in particular things rather than tedious abstractions — patriotism of this sort will be crushed. Men who fancy themselves conservatives regularly repeat the mantra that one may become an American by assenting to certain ideas about democracy, thereby making American patriotism contingent on a democratic ideology. The very distinction between republic and democracy, which was so vital to the Founders, they have abandoned completely. It is no longer enough that a man simply loves the Republic. He must embrace an ideology.
Well ideology is the handmaid of tyranny. America was long blessed by the absence of ideology; and it is no accident that she has thus abhorred tyranny. Our creed arose out of a living tradition, not out of the conjectures of intellectuals. Even our Founders were most them working lawyers, farmers, businessmen, not intellectuals; and in any case the Republic was informed by a tradition much larger than any of them. That tradition cannot be abstracted and fashioned into ideology without fatal violence to it.
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According to dictionary.com, it defines patriotism as devoted love, defense of one's country, and national loyalty. Ideology is defined as the set of beliefs.
Perhaps they are two different things, and it's easy for us to mix them together. For some Democrats, they keep "selling" out America to our enemies because of their liberal beliefs, so it's easy for us to see some liberals behaving dishonorably.
Dan
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Daniel 2:20 And he [God] changeth the times and seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding.
I turn to Touchstone's Anthony Esolen for some definitions:
The virtue of patriotism is, simply, a special love and honor for one's native land. Its soil is the small and local: it is expressed most powerfully in the celebration of our holidays, commemorating when our fathers stood against the Redcoats or the Turks or the armies of Napoleon, giving thanks to the God we worship, even if that worship is not universal. So what if our games are clumsy and hard for strangers to figure out? We still play them cheerfully, because they are our games. Patriotism is not selfishness -- though human selfishness can corrupt anything. It is a subset of charity, and is stirred by gratitude to those who gave us what we have not provided for ourselves. It is implied in the great commandment that, among the ten, bridges our duty to God and our duty to neighbor: "Honor thy father and thy mother." Now sometimes the world may be right, and your country may be wicked; and in those cases we must look to prudence, and to virtues that are higher than patriotism. But unless you are living in Nazi Germany, in this world of tangled good and evil and wisdom and ignorance you will usually be called on, by patriotism, to love a country that is deserving of that special devotion despite its shortcomings, and certainly not to despise it.
An ideology, by contrast, is concerned exclusively with theory. It need have no ground in concrete things.
________________
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
I was recently in Boston and I spent part of my time there in the public library reading a tract-sized book by Russell Kirk, "The American Cause." I felt it gave voice to my intuitions and indicates Americans are united by values, principles and beliefs.
It is about American identity, reflecting his attempt to offer "a statement of the moral and social principles which the American nation upholds in our time of troubles." Central to his content are idea words, for example: liberty, democracy, justice, order, religious faith. As previously argued, these words/ideas are not necessarily mere abstractions; they have real referents in experience. To argue that they are necessarily abstractions and therefore ideological brands even Kirk an ideologue.
The ideologue for Kirk is one who "thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature."
Gelernter and Caldwell and myself may be ideologues in that sense but I expect you may need to structure your rhetoric a bit differently to demonstrate and attack that.
The Intro for the reissue of his book can be found at http://www.isi.org/books/content/330intro.pdf
John E.
on the American identity, then I probably have no argument with you.
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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
I decided to pull my punches until I could additionally get through lectures on the medieval period in order to match your scope (will still be lacking on Byzantium), but there is something I came across in American thought that I am considering transcribing for your reaction.
Cap'n Ozzy Slashface
This commentary is a thoughtful contribution in a difficult time. It is an abstract (Americanist) ideology that causes the President to pursue the Wilsonian foreign policy of imposing democracy.
American practice and tradition would prefer the perspective of John Quincy Adams: "America … is a well-wisher to the liberty and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Unfortunately, Feather McSwirly completely misunderstands the context of the Disraeli quote that Dr. Gelernter cites. In Disraeli's day, the liberals were those whom today we call conservatives. The conservatives in Disraeli's day were those who supported the crown, established religion, aristocratic privilege, in short, all the things the American Founding overturned. The liberals of that time also opposed international bodies such as the Communist international, Marxism, socialism. Read F.A. Hayek again so you will understand that the liberals Disraeli refers to are those who are today those who support the Constitution and the American Founding. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Washington, all of the founders were considered proponents of liberal democracy, in fact the pre-eminent proponents of liberal democracy, as opposed to Monarchy, Aristocracy, and established religion. The American Founding was effected in its entirety under the influence of proponents of liberal democracy, particularly the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, in the Age of Reason. Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party (and he indeed believed in the Republic and did more than any man to preserve it) wsa a liberal, who referred to the abstract principles the Founders promulgated, that are Universally true and applicable in all times and places. Wilson was not a champion of democracy, but a Progressive, who was dissatisfied with the American Founding with its limitations on Government (such as the Bill of Rights). His internationalist approach was not based on the American Founding, but a Progressivism in which government possesses authority to improve the populace, tending strongly toward Marxism and the idea of th historical development of rights, as opposed to the idea of Natural Rights of the Founders. The Founders left improvement of the populace to the citizens themselves and their right to associate and adhere to the religion of their choice, which resulted in an explosion of religious activity in America that Tocqueville commented on. American goodness, which he said was a necessary precondition of American greatness, was a product of the government not trying to dictate how to improve the citizenry. Todays so-called liberals (the application of the terms have been reversed) abjure the label, as does Hillary, because of its historical association with liberal democracy. She prefers the Progressive agenda, which is based not on abstract ideas, such as "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..." Hillary and the Progressives believe they are capable of "improving" the people, through government mandate, essentially coercion. Progressives believe that rights are historic and granted by government, not by the Creator, e.g., they don't believe in Natural Rights. Note that the great project of the Progressives in America was Eugenics, the improvement of the race, leading to laws allowing forced sterilization of "undesireables" in virtrually every state in the Union (Califormia practiced this more advidly than any other state--American Eugenics formed the basis for Nazi laws that culminated in the Holocaust--Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the case of Buck vs. Bell in Tennessee, ordered the forced sterilization of a normal young girl whom he mistakenly believed to be retarded simply because her mother and grandmother were believed to be, with the ringing endorsement, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!") Read Leo Strauss's great treatis on this issue: Natural Rights and History". Admittedly Leo Strauss came to the views expressed in this book belatedly when he realized in the wake of WWII that only America stood between liberty and universal tyranny. Then read the expositions of Harry Jaffa on what Natural Rights are, and what they mean. The Founders, having seen the abuses of the Crown and the Aristocracy, were certain that government did not have the power or the ability to improve mankind, that individuals did that for themselves under the influence of religion and religious freedom. Dr. Gelernter understands this perfectly well, in contrast to this commentator on his discourse. Unfortunately, Red Staters need to get a little more grounded in history. Start spending a little time on the website of the Claremont Institute. Rad the commentary by Thomas G. West and Richard A. Shambra. Dr. Gelernter is very worth reading and quite correct in his analyses. Going further, it is also true that the Founders, in the Declaration of Independence, followed the lead of the most respected rational treatise of the day, which was Euclids Geometry, and in the Declaration of Independence enunciated their Axioms ("Self-evident Truths"). These were men of reason, as well as of faith. The American Founding is the highst expression of the philosophy of government ever produced, as valid in its sphere as is Euclid's Geometry in the sphere of logic and plane geometry. Essential to it is the concept of Natural Rights. As well as its applicability universally, as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Please folks, don't criticize what you don't understand. The Universality of the American Founding is inherent and explicit in the documents, but self government requires agreement with the principles of the Founding, and it will ever be thus. Democracy is not imposed, and it never will or can be. Defeat of Tyranny as it threatens our democracy will remain ever necessary. Because of the Universal nature of the Founding, it remains the main challenge to tyranny everywhere and always, and hence, America will always be a target of tyranny of whatever form, as it is correctly perceived as the great universal counterweight to tyranny, as proven in the great wars of the 20th Century. Gelernter is an American patriot and a great and wise thinker. You only hurt your own case by attempting to criticize him. He's way ahead of the rest of us. That might have something to do with why the Unabomber targetted him. The man is a godsend for the nation, and we need a lot more like him. Believe me, he is on your side whole-heartedly, and championing America and its founding in the most admirably way, even if you don't quite understand that.
Kent J. Lyon
...when they see me they'll say, "There goes Loren Wallace,
the greatest thing to ever climb into a race car."
Thanks for that analytical history lesson. It mostly corresponds to what my studies are indicating.
The labels and categories we use to day certainly don't seem to match those of our history. But with regard to government transforming the citizen, a/k/a instilling virtue -- what we are calling a progressive agenda today -- don't you recognize a faction among the founders who advocated Classical republicanism (as opposed to liberal republicanism) wherein the republic depended on virtue which must be _instilled_ and in the fashion of Aristotle and Cicero valued the individual for the sake of the society (as opposed to what is more common among us today: the society for the sake of the individual). These were often advocates of "establishment" and in a sense were conserving tradition. The wax and wane of their influence is fuzzy.
So, some today claim _true_ conservatism must reject liberalism root and branch, and so even the liberal republicanism that clearly influenced our founding polity. This seems to produce ironies. Ideology is bashed but even authentic American tradition can be abjured for its failings with respect to classical republicanism. Ideology itself is ideologically bashed in order to make room for one's own pure-bred ideology. And then there are the coincidences with modern progressives: a motivation to use social/political institutions to mold the individual citizen; the attack on the admissibility of universal truths about humanity and society; spite for free market economics. I'd like to know the causes of these tangles.
I'll be following your reading tips.
John E.
But as far as I can tell you barely addressed my critique of Gelernter, which did not, in fact, hinge on his adducing of Disraeli. It hinged rather on his perilous inclination to detach American principles from the lived tradition where they are made; the attempt, in other words, to saw abstract truths off from history and incarnation, to treat them as a complete and free-standing system disconnected from its roots in reality.
I have read Strauss, and Jaffa, and Tocqueville, and Thomas G. West. I have not only "spent a little time" at the Claremont website; I have contributed to it. CRB is a fine publication; one of the very best in the country. I worry, though, that many of its contributors, like Gelernter, in their eagerness to abstract philosophical principles from the American tradition, endanger that tradition itself. They become in a sense positivists (as a colleague at another website puts it), thinking the abstractions of a thing the whole reality of it, when in fact the human tradition of self-government precedes them.
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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
When you ditch my pirate name, if possilbe, could you make my "by" line read "John E." instead of johne.
Thanks.
"I worry, though, that many of its contributors, like Gelernter, in their eagerness to abstract philosophical principles from the American tradition, endanger that tradition itself. "
That sounds like a practical concern and argument. And one I can follow. I often interpret you otherwise as primarily making an argument in principle against the possibilty of universal principle. At which point I become quite distracted. How should I interpret you? Or better yet, how do you understand your own thinking along this continuum?
I often interpret you otherwise as primarily making an argument in principle against the possibility of universal principle.
Then you misinterpret me. I believe in quite a number of universal principles. For instance, the Nicene Creed.
My contention here is that human communities, and the traditions that characterize them, precede political principles. It is only once these communities become as it were self-aware, that they can even think about applying the principles to others outside of them.
In the case of America, there was a community (or collection of interactive communities) before there was, for instance, a Declaration. There were even documents stating these communities' principles as far back as the Mayflower Compact.
Now the error of Gelernter as others, in my view, is their overrating of the principles at the expense of the tradition; this partition of an organic unity. As one of my colleagues has written, "Clearly there are universal truths, and clearly there are local particulars . . . But one of our principles or traditions (it is difficult to say which really) is modesty in our encounter with the incarnate world: that something may be abstractly desirable by no means licenses us to usurp its actual realization in particular times and places among particular peoples from Providence."
I'm glad he mentioned the doctrine of the Incarnation, for this is at the heart of the matter. The Very God has touched the world with his personal presence, donned the flesh and dwelt among us. The world is forever changed. And however noble our principles, unhinged from the incarnate world, they will become monstrous.
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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Mindless anti-nationalism one day will join communism, fascism, and Islamism on the ash heap of history. In the meantime, though, millions will suffer. As you point out, smaller versions of this mindset, to wit, eugenics and so forth already have unleashed demons we can see at work. The utopian impulse has manifested itself many timss, on large and small scalls, and usually to the detriment of mankind.
As for Gelenter, the larger question for me is why he refuses to accept American exceptionalism as a concrete national phenomenon and opts for the abstraction, as you point out. Is it guilt? A fear of jingoism accusations? Or, as you suggest, the natural inclination of an ideologue?
Paul seems to favor faith over reason, and to equate ideas with ideology. I beleive Gelernter is promulgating ideas, rather than ideology. To elevate traditions and institutions above ideas, as worthy of preservation in and of themselves, for resons of continuity and community and place is to abandon half of our human capacities. I tend to favor the view expressed recently of Pope Benedict regarding the importance of the two great characteristics of Western Civilization, of Reason and Faith, using both. I believe the Founders did that. Institutions, traditions, and values and principles interplay with abstract idease, as Greek Rationalism interacts with Judaic and Christian religion to form the Western Tradition. I don't think we can do without either and survive. I think the Founders believed that. They did not, however, expect government to provide salvation, or assure the character and virtue of the citizenry. I think they recognized that religion did that much better than government, and, indeed, as they lived in a society that already was characterized by religious pluralism, with colonies founded by Puritans, Catholics, Quakers, and various Protestant persuasions, they had little choice if they wished to unite the Colonies than to ban the establishment of religion and allow the free exercise thereof (which has indeed been twisted by progressives, using the institutions and principles of the Gounding, to progressively ban the exercise of religion.
America has repeatedly been called a creedal nation, Americanism a creed, indeed a religion, specifically by Gelernter, and in a sense I think he has a very good point. However, I think the nation has lost sight of the exercise of Reason by the Founders, and the statements regarding acceptance of certain ideas to become an American somewhat inchoately indicate this. But as I alluded to earlier, the Declartation of Independence was a most remarkable document in that it literally stated Universal Axioms (Self-evident Truths) of government, in exactly the same form as Euclid chose his Acioms for his plane geometry, the first entirely deductive system of thought. Notably, no more perfect example of deductive reason has ever been created by the human mind. Similarly, no more perfect rational and deductive system of government has ever been devised by Man than was effected in the American Founding. While the American Founding was the result (I would say the culmination) of an historical process, as an avowed American exceptionalist, both in regard to history as well as ideas, I also accept the Founding because of the ideas expounded by those who undertook it, not as a catechism, but as a reasoned whole that has never been equaled or surpassed in the history of the world. Octavio Paz said that Geometry cannot replace myth (he was perhaps most infuenced by Marx and Freud), criticizing America for accepting sterile and geometric ideas and creating their government, rather than having that government grow out of historical tradition, suited to a time and a place and a people. He was much impressed with the demand of the Zapatistas to return to the system of communal land that existed under the Aztec system before the Conquest, and was for a time recognized by the Crown, and objected to the sterile Positivism of the regimes that prevailing regimes that adopted the ideas of Comte and Spencer, andof modern industrialization and capitalism, and imposed them on a country without the traditions or capacity to assimilate them, possessing a ruling oligarchy and a wealthy landed class with a large peasantry, essentially a feudalist society.
I for one disagree, and believe that Reason must be included in human endeavors, including government, as we will do poorly without it, as we will do poorly without Faith.
An earlier historic comparison might be in order.
The Egyptians used the Pythagorean relation for a thousand years to re-survey the land after each Nile flood. They would tie knots in ropes at equal distances, three knots in one rope, four knots in another, and 5 knots in a third, and use the first two ropes as the sides of a triangle, and the third as the hypoteneuse, to get a right angle in their surveying. Yet they never devised geometry. Pythagoras, who had travelled in Egypt, apparently learned this technique, and later took if further. He proved his famous theorem, showing that any right triangle satisfied the relation that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. He proved the universal validity of the local and specific practice of the Egyptians. The Greeks then over several centuries developed deductive reasoning, culminating in Euclid's Geometry. The main characteristic of that plane geometry, aside from its deductive nature, was the highly prescient selection of axioms:
1) A straight line can be drawn between any two points.
2)A straight line can be extended indefinitely.
3)A circle can be drawn by rotating a line segment (radius) around a point at one end of the line.
4)All right angles are equal.
5)The Parallel line postulate: If the angles formed by a straight line crossing two other straight lines forms angles less than 180 degrees on one side, the two straight lines if extended will intersect on the side of the angles of less than 180 degrees.
It was not the Egypian civilization that bequeathed reson and science to the Western World. And although the Catholic Church may have at times appeared to object to Reson and Science, as for example with Galileo, Benedict certainly does not do so. Nor does he back down from Faith, of course (I'm not Catholic, but I certainly admire his statements on these topics--I take it Paul is Catholic?) Indeed, a case can be made that the rise of rationalism in ancient Greece, along with the idea of democracy, were what propelled that Athenian civilization to the greatness it achieved in the Hellenic age. And yes, there is a Platonic and idealist aspect to the Axioms of the American Founding, setting an ideal that we have yet to achieve, and that we will likely never achieve in the mortal coil, but to which we should aspire. Who can argue that the Consitutional Amendment permitting an Income Tax, and the implementation of a steeply progressive Income Tax and the IRS to collect it, given that #2 on the list of the agenda of the Communist Manifesto, after confiscation of property (now allowed in the U.S> after the Kelo vs. New London decision) is a steeply progressive Income Tax, is inimical to the American Founding (John Stuart Mill was right to consider a progressive income tax a form of theft--and why do progressives like to be called progressive? Of course, because they are Marxists at heart and draw inspiration from tis plank in the Communist agenda--this of course is considered irrational ranting by the left, in fact by all officials of government, and those who ogject, and act on their objection, such as Wesley Snipe, are ridiculed and pay a steep price). The point is that ideas do have consequences, and as noted, one must understand the right ideas, as Paul seems to demean. But ideas are not ideology.
After more than 2000 years of analysis, it was determined that Euclid's geometry is as logically perfect as any axiomatic or deductive system ever devised by the mind of man. Other geomtries with other axioms are possible, such as Riemann geometry, used in Einstein's formulation of General Relativity, but none are more logically perfect, and may be less so. No such alternative axioms of government have ever been advanced that come anywhere near the completeness and consistency of the axioms of the American founding (the Communist Manifesto is a travesty of logic and reason, lacking both). The Progressive agenda is a bizarre idea that government can supplant God and provide temporal salvation, returning to the ancient royal paradigm by which all leaders sought to present themselves as Gods, from the Pharoahs of Egypt, to Alexander, to Caesar, or possessing divine authority as the Kings of Europe and England claiming their divine right, to Hitler, and the atheist man/gods Stalin, and Mao.
Against all of this stands the American Founding with its most perfect Axioms of governance:
1)All men are created equal. (There is no divine right of kings, no hereditary aristocracy, no absolute power of any dictator or totalitarian)
2)They are endowed by their Creator (conceived by the Deist Founders as Nature and Nature's God) with unalienable rights (not arbitrary or fungible rights, frivolously picked or arbitrary, but fundamental and universal rights they possess as sentient and active beings capable of self-governance, the most basic, of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, e.g., the right to own property and govern their own lives in their own sphere, the social compact of the Scottish Enlightenment, the most fundamental rights that are synonomous with being human and alive).
3. Governments are formed to protect those rights.
4. Governments obtain their just powers from the consent of the governed (Governments do not grant arbitrary rights to the governed through an historical process)
5. Whenever any government egregeiously abuses the rights of the citizens, it is the right (after Locke), indeed the duty, of the citizenry to throw off the shackles of such government.
If one is to reject the universality of the American Founding, one might as well reject Euclidean, or any other, Geometry, or all axiomatic or deductive systems of reason. Adhering to Faith, or tradition, or long-standing institutions (such as the Family) does not require rejecting the rational basis of the American Founding and the American government. And, as a social compact, the American Founding is not immune from subversion from within, with distortion of institutions and traditions to emasculate and eviscerate the principles of the Founding, which is happening as we write.
I contend that the U.S. Constitution was written specifically to structure government to embody the Axioms as stated in the Declaration of Independence, in a mechanical sense, as a fine watch, rationally and carefully constructed, after the Newtonian Mechanical World View that prevailed at the time of the Founders, with flywheels and gears, (checks and balances), the Machine of Government if you will, much as the Deity had created the World and the Cosmos for the benefit of mankind, with the Founders actually trying to create a structure of Government that would secure the blessings of liberty in perpetuity to generations yet unborn, giving us the Republic, as Benjamin Franklin stated, if we can keep it (and that is becoming more dubious by the day).
So perhaps I could be called an American Platonist. But I certainly don't dismiss the profound religious perspective of people like Paul, and count it much to the good of the Nation, and am appreciative of it and grateful for such citizens. I will of course be the first to admit that the historical implementation of the ideals of the Founding have never been nor ever will be fully realized. Yet I am more like Browning than Martin Luther King. I can't claim to have been to the top of the Mountain and seen the promised land, but I believe that it exists, and that we can travel toward it, as a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for. I tend to go with the Mormons on the historical founding. They see divine providence at work in the founding, proclaiming their belief that the Founding was undertaken by men whom God raised up for the very purpose, and have essentially canonized the Founding documents, as well as the Founders. These were mere mortals, however, and quite flawed individuals, but this is only more evidence of the hand of Providence in the founding. Even Nat Henthoff, a self-described "Flaming Atheist Jew", former board member of the ACLU, and jazz impresario, stated that his only religion is the U.S. Constitution.
Octavio Paz complained that Americans are very outspoken and involved in government, but that their objections seemed to only go to process, and not to the roots of government. I take that to be an indication of the broad acceptance of the Axioms, the Founding Principles, of America. America is an Axiomatic nation. In fact, the only Axiomatic nation. However, as Santayana said,regarding reason, science, knowledge, faith: "...Our knowledge is a torch of smokey pine, that lights the pathway but one step ahead, across a void of mystery and dread. Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine, by which alone the mortal mind is led unto the thinking of the thought Divine."
Kent J. Lyon
Trackbacked by The Thunder Run - Web Reconnaissance for 09/19/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.