The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (41 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Jefferson was a classically educated man writing for his peers, not for
Redbook
or the
New York Times.
Those men understood that “happiness” was the aim of all the ancient moral philosophies, and of all the Christian communions. Moreover, they agreed that one of the aims of government was the promotion of the good of man, a good which was reducible neither to naked will nor to the accumulation of material goods. “All sober inquiries after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian,” wrote Adams, “have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue” (Kirk;
Selected Writings
). But man will not be virtuous by inclination. He will prefer sloth to industry, slumber to wakefulness, and pleasantries to the bracing work of liberty. Man cannot perfect himself. He needs assistance. If so, then it is not religion that needs the prop of the State, but the State that cannot long survive without religion. Madison, no friend to any established church, admitted as much.
 
None of these men believed that virtue was a matter of opinion—that was the rogue’s way out. And they were too deeply read in scripture and in ancient moral philosophy (especially Stoicism) to believe that you could practice your virtue in privacy. Happiness requires virtue, and virtue requires a community that fosters it, wherein the virtue may be practiced. But if people are vicious, then the chaos into which they will plunge their cities will prevent even virtuous people from enjoying the full freedom of a civic life.
 
In other words, the pursuit of happiness
is not the pursuit of pleasure.
 
America’s forgotten models: Rome and Athens
 
The Founders had two principal models for the structure, though not necessarily the spirit, of their new republic: Rome and Athens. They borrowed something from each. What they borrowed, we have forgotten.
 
From Athens they retained a strong attachment to the local. There was no pan-Hellenic state before the half-barbarian Philip of Macedon created one by force. After Philip, there was no free Athens, no free Sparta, no free Corinth. Those of the Founders most committed to the rights of the individual states, especially the farmers in the South, understood the problem. They did not want to be appendages to an empire. In this sense, and maybe in this sense alone, Jefferson was
more
conservative than his Federalist opponent, Alexander Hamilton. It is to our shame that we find such loyalty to a local place hard to understand. Being
open-minded
means rising above your circumstances. Hometown pride, we sneer, is chauvinistic and narrow-minded.
 
But in Jefferson’s time, to be a Virginian meant a great deal: Virginia had her own venerable history, her own holidays, and her own trade. Other states, for a time, had their own established churches. Kant would wince, and so would today’s cosmopolitan.
 
Still, even the most ardent democrats understood that the example of Athens was dubious. After all, Athens fell. Its democracy lasted less than a century. It was Jefferson’s more cautious democratic colleague, Madison, who noted that five thousand men, even if each were as wise as Socrates, would still be no more than a mob.
24
Democracy in its pure form tends to destroy freedom, and then it yields to a tyrant who can settle the resulting chaos. That is what Plato said; so did the Federalist, Fisher Ames:
 
Our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratick for liberty. What is to become of it, He who made it best knows. Its vice will govern it, by practising upon its folly. This is ordained for democracies. (Kirk; letter of Oct 26, 1803;
Works
)
 
 
 
 
A Fatal Flaw in America
 
Alexis de Tocqueville identified well a dangerous tendency of Americans:
There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.
 
 
 
Democracy in America
(ch. 3, 56)
 
 
Freedom can tolerate a good deal of pride; it can tolerate very little envy. Which passion for equality—the manly or the depraved—has predominated in our age of contempt for the genuine excellence of others?
 
 
So the Founders looked to Rome. Adams, theorizing about his ideal state, clearly has in mind the checks and balances provided by the Roman consuls, the tribunes of the people, the aristocratic Senate, and the popular assembly.
25
Our Senate was supposed to revive the Senate of Rome, only more committed to the welfare of all the people. Its name suggests the sort of men who would serve:
old men,
made wise by experience, and sufficiently established in life so as not to be tempted to use public power to fatten their purses. They were not elected by the people—popular appeal is
not
what you want in a Senator. They were elected by state legislatures, ensuring for the states a great measure of authority
over the federal government.
 
Everywhere in our Constitution we find an attempt to combine a strong federal government, able to meet the needs of a rapidly growing nation, with a preference for the civic life of the state and the community. So the people elect representatives from what should be geographically coherent districts: a city with its outlying county, or a range of farmland, or the upland ridges. So too, by the Constitution, the people vote not for the president but for electors: and though most electors are now bound by law to follow their state’s will, this hedge between the people and the presidency has had the happy result of compelling candidates to win
states.
That prevents people from the fringe from throwing American elections into confusion. If you can’t win a state, you can’t win anything. Had the decadent Weimar Republic had such a system, Hitler might never have come to power.
 
Saving reason from itself
 
The founding of America was, no matter what a Frenchman might say, the most world-changing event of the century. But it also fit well with a conservative and, for the time, politically
incorrect
tradition of thought. We can call this tradition
the call for reason to return to its senses
and admit its limitations.
 
Suppose a philosopher were to conclude that a little child has no more rights than a chimpanzee. We might call him mad, or we might, as Princeton has done, award him an endowed chair of bioethics.
26
If we were rationalists of the eighteenth century, we’d look upon blacks or Indians as members of an inferior race, and we’d “prove” it by supposedly scientific means. We’d have charts and numbers at our call, and calipers to measure the thickness of skulls (other people’s, not our own). Man has oppressed man from the Fall. But for the first time, in the Enlightenment, man summoned science to justify it. Racism properly understood begins here.
27
It begins with one function of reason, the scientific or mathematical, grown like a tumor, devouring the rest.
 
But the more unfashionable thinkers and writers understood, with Aristotle, that you have to match your reasoning to the subject matter. To prove Pythagoras’ theorem, you use logical deduction. To discuss the structure of a just city, you call upon all your experience of human beings: you see what sort of creature man is, how he is made up of intellect and appetite, reason and will, and you legislate accordingly. You may find that a government suitable for seafarers will not work for inland farmers. That’s all right, so long as each has as its goal the fulfillment of man’s end: intellectual and practical virtue. It’s why, said Aristotle, you can study geometry as a schoolboy, but “a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science.”
28
As for theology, that must require the response of our whole beings, our capacity not only to deduce but to “hear,” as the Scriptures so often put it, the law and the goodness of God.
 
So I’d like to end this chapter with a few and woefully short glances at men who attempted to save reason from itself. First among these is the great mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662).
 
When Pascal was a little boy, wrote his sister, “he played with conic sections as other children would play with toys.”
29
Conic sections—shapes such as the parabola (the path of a projectile) and an ellipse (the path of a planet, Newton discovered)—marked the height of ancient mathematics; the next step would be calculus. Pascal, without a tutor, had advanced in the subject beyond the discoveries of the great Apollonius of Perga,
at age sixteen.
He is one of the fathers of projective geometry, the field that analyzes what happens to shapes when they are projected upon other shapes. By the time he was eighteen he had, from his close study of clocks, invented the world’s first calculating machine. He proved that vacuums exist and that air exerts pressure. He is the first great scientist of probability: Pascal’s Triangle links dice-throwing with algebra and number theory. If your Cardinals need to win eight of their last ten games to have a shot at the World Series, the Triangle will help you find the odds.
 
 
 
Pascal vs. the Enlightenment
 
If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man . . . ?
 
 
—Blaise Pascal
,
Pensées
(450)
 
And maybe that is the great failing of the Enlightenment. All that blazing light struck men blind. One observable fact contradicts the premises of the Enlightenment: the heart of man.
 
 
But, unlike those of our day who insist that all religions are the same (usually because they don’t pay much attention to them), Pascal insisted upon the
limits
of reason, and upon the sovereignty of God, who might choose a shepherd without consulting the mathematician first. Pascal had an experience of the living God, which he recorded on a piece of paper and sewed into the lining of his coat, so that it would be with him always:
 
FIRE: The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob—not the God of the philosophers.
 
 
“To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher,” he said (
Pensées,
4), distinguishing what logic can do from what it cannot do, and affirming the importance of what he called intuition. “The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know” (277). As for the rationalist who considers himself too high and mighty for such popular things as religious faith, Pascal cuts him open with three short words: “
Skeptic,
for obstinate” (
Pensées,
51).

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