The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (42 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Pascal reads like a
Politically Incorrect Guide
™
to Mankind
, a great corrective to our vanity: “The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him” (555). To ignore that corruption, man will do anything; in fact, he spends most of his life in a complicated play, pretending to care about what he does not love, all to distract himself from the loneliness of his heart, the vanity of his days, and the shortness of life.
 
Pascal, keenest of psychological writers, opened a way that a few would take. The direction of European culture, after Newton, lay rather in exposing the “laws” whereby we know, as if our minds were machines acted upon by machines. Eventually, as it did in the ancient world, materialism led to skepticism—other than probable knowledge about matter, could we know anything at all?
 
The pious Immanuel Kant, mild-mannered yet fiercely proud of his prodigious accomplishments, never traveled far beyond his native city of Koenigsberg, the capital of imperial Prussia. Yet he was typical of his age in his attempt to recast moral reasoning as a kind of mathematics, divorced from the flesh and blood of man, and from place and time. Kant had accepted the method of the skeptic English philosopher David Hume, who argued that we cannot infer an idea of “cause” from our observation of events. I see the cue ball strike the eight ball, and it moves. I associate the events in my mind, says Hume, and then add to them an extraneous conception of my own, a fiction called “cause.”
30
Now if there is no such thing as cause, then many things fall into meaninglessness. Metaphysics, for one: both that of the ancient philosophers, and that of the Christian theologians, including those who, like Aquinas, used the idea of causality to prove the existence of God. But the acid corrodes further, as Kant pointed out. If we ignore Hume’s challenge, scientific and mathematical reasoning too must fall. In particular, we shall have no good reason to believe in physical law, because all we ever see is that, when A has happened, B has followed.
 
So Kant set out to rescue both metaphysics and reason from the threat of skeptical empiricism. Kant was no materialist. He affirmed that the mind can make true and productive judgments about things apart from deductions based on sense experience. Note that well: we do not, says Kant, base our judgments about the laws of physics and mathematics upon experience, even when we happen to learn
about
such laws through experience (for example, when we see water evaporate). Hume should have not have dismissed abstract reasoning so cavalierly. Had he considered not only causality, which he wanted to attack (because he wanted to slay the dragon of theology), but mathematics, “the good company into which metaphysics would thus have been brought, would have saved it from the danger of a contemptuous ill-treatment” (
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,
ch. 4). Kant will attempt, hampered by what many believe was his inattentiveness to the subtleties of medieval thinking, to restore the idea of cause, using what he calls transcendental ideas—not thoughts so much as the structuring principles of our minds—to “destroy the rash assertions of Materialism, of Naturalism, and of Fatalism, and thus to afford scope for the moral Ideas beyond the field of speculation” (60).
 
Reason, then, leads Kant to affirm that objective moral good exists. Now, the method he used to determine good and evil would persuade no one but a philosopher, and would probably not move him to action, anyway. It is this, in brief:
 
I am a rational creature, an end in myself and no mere object. So, then, are all other rational creatures. Then I cannot use them as objects merely, without violating my nature. In particular, if I cannot “universalize” the moral rule I wish to abide by, then it is no rule at all. For instance, I want to promise my friend Stalin that I will not attack Russia if he will not attack Germany. But I do not intend to keep that promise; I hate Russia. Now, obviously, if everyone made lying promises, there would be no such things as promises, because no one would ever believe what anyone was saying. Therefore my “rule”—
I want to make a lying promise, because it would be good for me and bad for my enemy
—contradicts itself. Therefore it is no rule. It is wrong.
31
 
The argument delivers a neat blow to our fashionable moral relativism. It condemns the Machiavellian notion that underlies political correctness: namely, that if
x
results in the political advantage of the correct people, you should do
x
. For if everyone behaved that way, we would be mired in chaos, and no politics worthy the name would survive. There would be no coherent
polis.
 
But there is something troubling about it. When people consider good and evil, they do not think about some abstract “mankind” they have never met. They do not consider the universe. They think instead about the man next door who plays loud music, or the pretty girl across the street who dances with her curtains up. They think about flesh and blood. But the Prussian philosopher disallows that. He will even say that, to the extent that Captain Standish derived joy from tending to his sick comrades, he
was not
engaged in a genuinely moral action. Duty—a stern embrace of what you do not like—trumps the happiness of virtue. So Kant rejects the classical definition of virtue, deriving from Aristotle and given full analysis by Aquinas, who say that a good man is one who so habitually does good things that it becomes a second nature for him, and it really and rightly brings him happiness. Kant also rejects the traditional Jewish and Christian understanding of love, which is never the abstract will of a disembodied being. When Saint Francis overcame his revulsion with love and ran to embrace the leper, he wasn’t thinking like an Enlightenment philosopher.
 
Edmund Burke, by comparison with Kant, was no philosopher at all; but his political and moral thinking was built upon the rock of piety and close observation, passionate but unsentimental observation of men such as we find them. The English politician and man of letters understood that the family and the community are the nurseries of virtue, both private and public. He also understood that what can be deduced, with mathematical logic, from clear principles is only a fraction of what man knows, and it does not include the most important things, either. Hence, like Sophocles, Virgil, and Shakespeare, Burke stressed the importance of
tradition
in moral and political thinking—not because tradition is quaint for holidays, but because it represented the hard-won wisdom of the centuries.
 
It may be laughable to the universalist, but Burke’s sense of tradition places us firmly in the only environment wherein we can learn to be wise and good. We are “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society” (44), the family, the clan, the village, and hence by degrees to “proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The politically correct slogan has it that we should “think globally, act locally.” Burke might reply that to “think globally” is not to think at all, just as to “love mankind” is not to love at all. Learn virtue
here
. If you want to love mankind, cook a nice meal for your children. If you want to clean the world, do the dishes.
 
To forget tradition is to set yourself on a raging sea. Here is Burke, on what happens when thinking universally is applied locally, without consideration for history, traditions, hallowed customs, religious faith, or loyalty: “Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not yet relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom” (
Reflections on the Revolution in
 
 
Federalism—Forgotten
 
James Madison, in
Federalist 39
, articulated a notion of federalism that became the foundation of the new republic:
 
In this relation [of the federal to the local governments], then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a
national
one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.
 
 
That was a long time ago. The federal government, like a grandmama ogre, is now pleased to dictate to the little people below how they shall raise their children, what they shall teach in school, how they shall conduct their local patriotic celebrations, and, it is to be feared, whether they shall use single-ply or double-ply paper in public restrooms. Whether such paper will be decorated with facsimiles of the Constitution has not yet been decided.
 
 
 
France
). Those words were written in 1790,
three years before
Robespierre and the Reign of Terror. On cherishing the old, regardless of the political theorems of the day: “Is every land-mark of the country to be done away in favour of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution?” On what France lost by its proclamation of equality (which would soon end in the triumph of the tyrant Napoleon): “It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself hath lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”
 
Burke’s
Reflections
is a bracing guide to every foolish exaggeration of the Enlightenment, now taken up and enshrined as holy law in our social sciences, that counts voters and tabulates incomes but cannot understand the heart of man: “In the groves of
their
academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.” It banishes the affections, but not the appetite, as we now know. We moderns do not often love our country, but we do want a lot from it, in tens and twenties. The country requires the same favor from our hands—in twenties and fifties.
 
Rousseau and the State
 
Conservatives sometimes trace back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau everything that has gone wrong in our system of education. They have some justification. Rousseau did understand, against some of the French rationalists, that
feeling
was indispensable for the moral imagination. But he acknowledged no legitimate soil for the nurture of this feeling, nor could he forge a connection between feeling and reason. That is, he accepted the false severance of reason from the proper ordering of the passions. He saw that the reduced “reason” of materialists like La Mettrie was inadequate. But he could not put things together again. He is the father of educational sentimentalism, and, not accidentally, of the state adoption of the schools to ensure that students learn the “correct” sentiments. We see these offspring already in his
La Nouvelle Heloise,
wherein he shows us how to protect a child from the influence of his surroundings, namely the earthy and ordinary habits of other children, manual laborers, housewives, old ladies with strange notions of medicine, village drunks, village philosophers, and priests. It is to take a child
out of the platoon.
Naturally, since most people are not Rousseau, if their children are to have the advantage of this artificial life, the State must provide it for them. More and more, that is what the State does.
 
Rousseau may be too easy to caricature. He did attempt to place virtue at the heart of his theories regarding education and politics. Nor is it quite just to point out that he himself was a pretty vicious fellow, siring illegitimate children whom he neglected. But if we cross the English Channel we find a man of so powerful an intellect, and so great a heart, that his very
conversation,
recorded by his friend James Boswell, has gone to making the finest biography ever written: Doctor Johnson. He is the English Pascal.
 
Samuel Johnson
 
Largely self-taught, afflicted by neurological ailments sometimes to the point of blackest despair, Samuel Johnson fought his way from penniless-ness to recognition as the greatest English man of letters of his time. To read one of his essays for
The Rambler
or
The Adventurer
is to be stunned with shame. How could one man possess so much learning, discoursing so easily about Aeschylus and Milton, without sounding like a dusty academic? How could he expect more than ten people in a London coffee house to understand what he was talking about? But he did, and more than ten did—far more.
 
The secret to Johnson’s wisdom was not that he kept his feelings in check. Far from it. It was that his feelings were nurtured by a classical education, a deep love of England, a devotion to the Church, a personal piety that abashed his worldly friends, a calm scrutiny of mankind in all walks of life (for Johnson had spent many a night in his youth without a roof over his head), and an habitual and humble introspection. Before he saw men’s hearts, he had looked into his own. That’s an operation that sentimentalists only pretend to perform. Rousseau pretended to perform it, was pleased with what he saw there, and concluded that, given the right education, man could be made perfect. Johnson performed that operation on his knees, and knew better than to believe such nonsense.

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