domingo, 31 de octubre de 2021

The root of Solzhenitsyn’s life work, and what are the practical steps we can take to follow in his footsteps.


Lessons for Today from Solzhenitsyn with Joseph Pearce

Crisis Point

Joseph Pearce, author of “Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile”, joins Crisis Point to discuss the life of this 20th century giant, and the lessons we can learn from him in our current crisis. We get to the root of Solzhenitsyn’s life work, and include practical steps we can take today to follow in his footsteps.

Links:
• Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile
• Joseph Pearce website
• “In a Nutshell” series
• Rebuilding Russia
• The Solzhenitsyn Reader

By 

Crisis Magazine has been America's leading source for Catholic perspectives on religion, politics, and culture since 1982.

Read more here - Source: www.crisismagazine.com


Mises: “The term progress is nonsensical when applied to cosmic events or to a comprehensive world view. We have no information about the plans of the prime mover.”

 Why Mises Rejected Common Notions of "Progress"


by David Gordon

Ludwig von Mises has some characteristically acute and important comments on the idea of progress in history, and in what follows, I’d like to address some of these. In the way he develops his views, one of the key themes of his notion of ethics plays an important role.

In contrast to those, like Herbert Spencer, who think that human history is progressive because it forms part of larger process of biological evolution, also viewed as progressive, Mises says that in biological evolution, what develops later is not “better,” or for that matter worse, than what has gone before. If natural selection results in one species’ supplanting another, that does not make the second species superior, even if it has traits that we prefer to those of the first. Mises puts the point in this way:

It was one of the shortcomings of nineteenth-century philosophies to have misinterpreted the meaning of cosmic change and to have smuggled into the theory of biological transformation the idea of progress. Looking backward from any given state of things to the states of the past one can fairly use the terms development and evolution in a neutral sense. Then evolution signifies the process which led from past conditions to the present. But one must guard against the fatal error of confusing change with improvement and evolution with evolution toward higher forms of life. Neither is it permissible to substitute a pseudoscientific anthropocentrism for the anthropocentrism of religion and the older metaphysical doctrines.

In what he says about evolution, Mises is in accord with the understanding of most modern biologists.

When Mises speaks of “pseudoscientific anthropocentrism,” what he means is that we human beings project our own importance to ourselves onto the process of evolution, so that we take ourselves to be the goal of history. But, he says, this is not part of science, which is purely descriptive.

As the argument stands so far, it contains a gap. From the fact that science is limited to describing and explaining change and cannot, within its own terms, properly speak of “improvements,” it does not follow that evolution has no goal. That would be true only if the standpoint of scientific description were the only way to assess what has occurred in the historical development of life or if no other way of assessment allowed room for a goal. In speaking of “goal” here, I have in mind a goal of the whole process, rather than the goals of individual persons. It is not part of descriptive science that such goals are precluded but only that they are not included within it.

Mises has anticipated this objection. He says: “The term progress is nonsensical when applied to cosmic events or to a comprehensive world view. We have no information about the plans of the prime mover.” I must say that Mises has given rather short shrift to claims of cosmic design, but to him his point was obvious, and one can see why he makes it. His fundamental aim in all his economic and social writing is to defend the system of social cooperation through the free market from all attacks against it. If people were to say that they have access to God’s plans for history, this might lead them to support interference with the free market, and it is Mises’s opinion that almost all those who did claim such direct access propose interfering with the market. For that reason, he opposes them. It doesn’t follow from this that Mises rejects religion, but to the extent he views it positively, it is religion that confines itself to individual salvation and avoids social doctrines that oppose the free market.

Mises takes aim also at another doctrine of progress. During the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many intellectuals thought that the growth of science and reason made progress inevitable. Mises rejects this view also, as it overestimates the influence of reason on human conduct. He says,

Eighteenth-century social philosophy was convinced that mankind has now finally entered the age of reason. While in the past theological and metaphysical errors were dominant, henceforth reason will be supreme. People will free themselves more and more from the chains of tradition and superstition and will dedicate all their efforts to the continuous improvement of social institutions. Every new generation will contribute its part to this glorious task. With the progress of time society will more and more become the society of free men, aiming at the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Temporary setbacks are, of course, not impossible. But finally the good cause will triumph because it is the cause of reason…. All these hopes were founded on the firm conviction, proper to the age, that the masses are both morally good and reasonable. The upper strata, the privileged aristocrats living on the fat of the land, were thought depraved. The common people, especially the peasants and the workers, were glorified in a romantic mood as noble and unerring in their judgment. Thus the philosophers were confident that democracy, government by the people, would bring about social perfection.

This prejudice was the fateful error of the humanitarians, the philosophers, and the liberals. Men are not infallible; they err very often. It is not true that the masses are always right and know the means for attaining the ends aimed at. ‘Belief in the common man’ is no better founded than was belief in the supernatural gifts of kings, priests, and noblemen.

You might think from all this that Mises has no use at all for the concept of progress, but that is not correct, and it is here that his view of ethics enters the scene. He thinks that ultimate ends cannot be rationally assessed. Nevertheless, almost everyone wants peace and material prosperity and these aims, we can show by strictly scientific, value-free argument, only the free market can achieve. To the extent that the free market is accepted, we can properly speak of progress; but we cannot say that the desirability of the market will lead to its general acceptance. That only time will tell.

In the foregoing, I have as usual confined myself to an account of Mises’s thought and have not sought to assess it critically.

Author:

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.


“Who should rule?” One answer is “I should,” and the other is “No one.”


God’s Truth


In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach ought to be to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him.

At last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Fort Worth, I had the honor of responding to a talk on the contemporary university by Prof. Pano Kanelos, former president of St. John’s College. He emphasized that the proper question for higher education is why. His analysis of the dual commitments of the modern university with its materialist assumptions struck me as particularly illuminating. He showed that, on the one hand, “the will to power is celebrated, and the end of humanity is to transcend any and all limitations. The answer to why is ‘because that is what I desire.’” On the other hand, the university embraces “the cultic meaning of history.” Since everything in the past has involved some people using power to dominate other people, power is “innately immoral,” and the pursuit of justice “is defined as the levelling of all hierarchies in the quest for universal material well-being. The answer to why is ‘because that is what is just’”—that is, if justice is understood as a forced equality.

These commitments contradict each other. They are opposite answers to the question, “Who should rule?” One answer is “should,” and the other is “No one.” The pretense that these answers can happily coexist explains the incoherence of much of public life today. Is contradiction a problem? Apparently not—unless you think that there is a powerfully clarifying and healing phenomenon called “the truth.”

Remember “the truth”? No one has ever said that discovering it was simple, but belief in its intrinsic power has before now seemed self-evident, the pursuit of it worth the effort, like reaching a proper medical diagnosis. These days, the idea that people of differing opinions can work together toward the discovery of the truth feels remote. Just mentioning “the truth” might bring on accusations of various kinds. Whose truth? one will be asked in the tones of high righteousness. The prevailing assumption is that there is no “truth” per se and that the term is always deployed as a mode of discrimination in the interests of power. Admittedly, the truth does discriminate—against deliberate lies and vagueness, “piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit” (Hebrews 4:12).

On the Sunday morning after the Philadelphia Society conference ended, I had breakfast with a friend who had been reading Plato’s Republic with a group of recent college graduates. He told me that what alarmed him was that none of these young people balked at the idea of a “noble lie” as the basis of the “city-in-speech” that Socrates founds during the dialogue. For my friend, the foundational lie about the common origins of the citizens undercut everything that followed. We differed on how to interpret the lie (to my mind, it provides the crucial irony of the dialogue), but my friend’s point was that his young interlocutors did not see anything wrong with founding a civil society on a fiction. They had imbibed the implicit teaching of the modern university. I suspect that they did not believe that it would be beneficial to know the truth.

Why? Because of the teaching of materialism that we inhabit a godless, indifferent, pointless material universe where consciousness itself is an accident. Why not promulgate a lie? What must be banished from the modern university, as Prof. Kanelos pointed out, is any understanding of transcendence. “Committed only to what is material and immanent, the modern university is at war with the very notion of truth.”

Ultimately, of course, God is the issue. The proud pretenders of this cultural moment have decided the question of His existence: The prevailing lie is that He does not exist. But the truth will out, as the old saying has it. Reading the Prophets helps in times like these. “I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself,/that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps” (Jeremiah 10:23). So does reading St. Paul: “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7).

In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach is to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him. Far from being steeped in mistrust and suspicion, our students at Wyoming Catholic College “begin their college education by experiencing nature not as an abstraction, but as the givenness both outside them and within.” They grow in confidence “that real questioning is possible and that the gauge of truth might be the experience of beauty and grandeur” that they encounter on the 21-day backpacking expedition that begins their freshman year and that continues in the great books of the curriculum.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

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Cicero, the greatest of Roman republicans said it was our duties (not our rights) that defined us


The Essence of Freedom

Our rights as Americans can never be separated from our duties. But we must also ask, what is our liberty for?

We live in an age of determinism, especially when it comes to academics and academia. There’s little choice, it seems, and everything is driven by some autonomous and often abstract forces, progressively (often) and inalterably. In the late 19th century, it was biology (Darwin), economics (Marx), or sexual urges (Freud); in the first half of the twentieth century, it became ideology (socialism, communism, and capitalism); and, in the late twentieth century, it became race, class, and gender and, more recently, the environment.

While I would never deny that biology, economics, sexual urges, race, class, or gender or the environment do not influence us, I would rather argue that each does shape us and, at times, delimits us, but we are also free, moral agents. I would also argue that life is messy. Sometimes, we are rational and sometimes we are passionate. Sometimes, we are calculating and sometimes we are spontaneous. In short, I would say that we are—especially as individuals—incredibly complicated.

For nearly 3,000 years, we have asked and debated: what is the human person? What is the relationship of man to man; and what is God? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Jefferson were all concerned with these questions.

What liberty allows, therefore, is moral agency; it is the willingness to take responsibility for one’s choices, for good and for ill. We must consider ourselves, importantly, morally capable and morally culpable.

Our rights, though can never be separated from our duties. But, we must also ask, what is our liberty for?

In his 1790/1791 lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, founding father James Wilson (one of the few to sign the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and was also radically anti-slavery) asserted—with no taint of shyness—“Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.”

The government best suited (but the most difficult to maintain) was a republic, a form that embodied and balanced the best of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The republic means “the common good,” “the good thing,” “the public thing.” It reflected the natural law as well as the order of the soul.

Like most of the Founders, Wilson thought the right to property was the highest right—but, by property, he didn’t mean stuff. He meant self.

“Character may be considered as a species of property; but, of all, the nearest, the dearest, and the most interest. . . . By the exertion of the same talents and virtues, property and character both are often acquired: by vice and indolence, both are often lost or destroyed. The love of reputation and the fear of dishonour are, by the all-gracious Author of our existence, implanted in our breasts, for purposes the most beneficent and wise.”

Expressing a typical Revolutionary-era sentiment, Wilson continued. “As a man is justified in defending, so he is justified in retaking, his property, or his peculiar relations, when from him they are unjustly taken and detained.”

In attendance at these lectures was our first president, George Washington, who said, in his first inaugural:

I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

It’s worth repeating: there are no rights without duties. Cicero, the greatest of Roman republicans said it was our duties (not our rights) that defined us. Still, in the words of George Washington, there was a caution or two. Just what makes a people worthy of liberty and of republicanism? Can they sustain the balance of rights and duties; can they follow the eternal rules of right and order?

Most of the Founders were trepidatious about our prospects as a republic. One of the least remembered—but at the time, most interesting of the Founders—was Mercy Otis Warren, author of a three-volume history of the American Revolution, published in 1805.

Though the name of liberty delights the ear, and tickles the fond pride of man, it is a jewel much oftener the play-thing of his imagination, than a possession of real stability: it may be acquired to-day in all the triumph of independent feelings, but perhaps to-morrow the world may be convinced, that mankind know not how to make a proper use of the prize, generally bartered in a short time, as a useless bauble, to the first officious master that will take the burden from the mind, by laying another on the shoulders of ten-fold weight.

And,

If this should ever become the deplorable situation of the United States, let some unborn historian in a far distant day, detail the lapse, and hold up the contrast between a simple, virtuous, and free people, and a degenerate, servile race of beings, corrupted by wealth, effeminated by luxury, impoverished by licentiousness, and become the automatons of intoxicated ambition.

Here, Mercy Otis Warren sounds very much like Livy in his lamentation for the end of the Roman Republic:

To the following considerations, I wish every one seriously and earnestly to attend; by what kind of men, and by what sort of conduct, in peace and war, the empire has been both acquired and extended: then, as discipline gradually declined, let him follow in his thoughts the structure of ancient morals, at first, as it were, leaning aside, then sinking farther and farther, then beginning to fall precipitate, until he arrives at the present times, when our vices have attained to such a height of enormity, that we can no longer endure either the burden of them, or the sharpness of the necessary remedies.

Cicero, already mentioned, compared the republic to a painting.

Thus, before our own time, the customs of our ancestors produced excellent men, and eminent men preserved our ancient customs and the institutions of their forefathers. But, though the republic, when it came to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colours, however, were already fading with age, our own time not only has neglected to freshen it by renewing the original colours, but has not even taken the trouble to preserve its configuration and, so to speak, its general outlines. For what is now left of the ‘ancient customs’ on which he said ‘the commonwealth of Rome’ was ‘founded firm.’? They have been, as we see, so completely buried in oblivion that they are not only no longer practiced, but are already unknown. And what shall I say of the men? For the loss of our customs is due to our lack of men, and for this great evil we must not only give an account, but must even defend ourselves in every way possible, as if we were accused of capital crime. For it through our own faults, not by any accident, that we retain only the form of the commonwealth, but have long since lost its substance.

These are words from roughly 50 B.C., but there’s no reason why one couldn’t state them in A.D. 2021.

The most important advocate of the American Revolution (and fiercest opponent of the French Revolution) was the grand Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke. He, too, wrestled with rights and duties, with liberties and obligations.

Taking it for granted that I do not write to the disciples of the Parisian philosophy, I may assume, that the awful author of our being is the author of our place in the order of existence; and that having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactick, not according to our will, but according to his, he has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us. We have obligations to mankind at large, which are not in consequence of any special voluntary pact. *They arise from the relation of man to man, and the relation of man to God, which relations are not matters of choice. On the contrary, the force of all the pacts which we enter into with any particular person or number of persons amongst mankind, depends upon those prior obligations. In some cases the subordinate relations are voluntary, in others they are necessary—but the duties are all compulsive. . . .Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. . . . If the social ties and ligaments, spun out of those physical relations which are the elements of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our will, so without any stipulation, on our part, are we bound by that relation called our country, which comprehends (as it has been well said) “all the charities of all.” 39 Nor are we left without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us, as it is awful and coercive. Our country is not a thing of mere physical locality. It consists, in a great measure, in the antient order into which we are born. We may have the same geographical situation, but another country; as we may have the same country in another soil. The place that determines our duty to our country is a social, civil relation.

While the American Revolution was one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world, it did, rightly, have a context. And to do it and our Founders justice, it is just and right to consider it within the larger framework of Western civilization. The Founders, as a whole, were liberally-educated men, attending college at age 14, after proving fluency in Greek and Latin.


Editor’s Note: This is part one of a presentation that Dr. Birzer gave at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota, on October 21, 2021. The second essay may be found here. It was the inaugural lecture of the Forum on History and Ethics series. He would especially like to thank President Griffiths, Provost Hanson, Dean Kenley, Professors Justin Blessinger and Jody Bottum, and Jon Lauck.]

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

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jueves, 28 de octubre de 2021

Smith, Hume, and Burke represent conservative liberalism. In that expression, “liberalism” comes second, but it is primary: It is the noun.


Smith, Hume, and Burke as Policy Liberals and Polity Conservatives


To understand renovations being made to a building, it is good to understand the kind of order that the renovator hopes to establish. Edmund Burke writes to a French correspondent in 1789: “Permit me then…to tell you what the freedom is that I love.” That freedom is liberal policy; and that is why he is so opposed to the goings-on in France: They will not conduce to “practical liberty” (1992, 7, 11). By understanding the sensibilities of Smith, Hume, and Burke in policy reform, we have a better sense of what their judgments would aim for, long-term, when they consider renovations to the polity.

But Smith, Hume, and Burke were conservative in a way that gave body and color to their liberalism. Smith, Hume, and Burke represent conservative liberalism.

In that expression, “liberalism” comes second, but it is primary: It is the noun. It communicates the moral life and the culture, and hence the institutions, including policymaking, they want lived in the house. In that house there are innumerable mansions. The modifying adjective, “conservative,” softens the punch of liberalism but enhances its wisdom and habits by moderating the claims made for the liberty principle, thereby making liberal principles more practical, pertinent, and robust. Conservative liberalism is a suitable name for the venerable political outlook of our three sages, a name that can span all continents, can connect back in time to the blessed arc of liberal civilization, and can endure through the ages. Hume, Burke, and especially Smith cap the original arc of liberalism and best represent classical liberalism.

I understand polity as something broader and more organic than the constituent parts of the government. Actions that significantly affect the polity raise issues of polity reformation. Dramatic reforms in immigration policy, for example, may significantly alter the electorate and norms surrounding the functioning of the polity, so mass immigration has a significant polity-reformation aspect to it. But most policy issues have a rather small aspect of polity reformation.

The polity conservatism of Hume, Smith, and Burke was not neutral. In matters of polity reformation, their liberalism would be favored, and the contrary disfavored. Still, the salient feature of their posture of polity reformation was conservatism.

My reading accords with the “three-sided comparison” of David Miller (1981, 196), which finds among the three men “substantial similarities in outlook…: a belief in economic freedom, a belief in social hierarchy, and a commitment to the political establishment of eighteenth-century Britain.” Hume, Smith, and Burke are repeatedly listed together by Friedrich Hayek as representative of the liberalism he espouses (Hayek 1948, 4-7; 1960, 55; 1967, 160).

“The Child of Jurisprudence Is Liberalism”

So says J.G.A. Pocock (1983, 249), and Dugald Stewart made similar remarks (1854, 26; cf. 183, 171).

Adam Smith maintained three senses of justice, one being commutative (Klein 2020b). Smith summarizes the basic precept of commutative justice as “abstaining from what is another’s” (TMS 269.10). He gives his most definite description of commutative justice’s “most sacred laws” (TMS 84.2) as not messing with other people’s person, property, and promises due. In the Treatise Hume copiously uses the word “abstain” in the same manner, and explains that the rules of commutative justice evolve to be precise and accurate (T 3.2.6.7-8; EPM 3.2.34 – 3.2.45). Hume and Smith are in these regards developing their own expressions of the natural jurisprudence tradition (Haakonssen 1981, 12; 1996, 27, 117-8; Buckle 1991, vii, ix).

Smith flips the duty of commutative justice (not messing with other people’s stuff) to state the correlated claim of right: Others not messing with one’s stuff. That principle operates in each of the two dimensions of his jural philosophy for modern civilization. That jural philosophy involves jural dualism, that is, two kinds of jural relationships, equal-equal, like you and your neighbor, and superior-inferior, or governor-governed (Diesel 2020a, b). Liberty is others, particularly the government, not messing with one’s stuff.

Smith speaks of “the violence of law” and related expressions in WN,[1] and in TMS of “fortunate violence” and “irresistible force”: we “submit,” “are taught to acquiesce” – not consent! – to “those superiors” (253.30). For Hume, the critic of social contract, it is the same, and likewise for Burke. Burke’s talk of “contract” and “compact” belongs to a rejection of contractarianism, for what he means is custom likened to a “virtual” contract (1992, 160), “by the spirit of philosophic analogy” (1999a, 122), and it is an assenting to God, not a consenting to any human political pact. The political theory of Hume, Smith, and Burke is conventionalist and not contractarian.

The conventionalist nature of their political theory pertains to the American identity. The Declaration of Independence and the rebel side of the War for Independence may have been imprinted, opportunely and perhaps opportunistically, with John Locke, Cato’s Letters, and Thomas Paine, but the Constitution and Federalist Papers bore, opportunely but not opportunistically, more the spirit of men like Hume and Smith, who rejected social contract.

There is a historistic element in liberty. However, it is pinned down within any modern jural-dualistic society by what I call the jural logic of one’s own: A type of action in the superior-inferior jural relationship is an initiation of coercion if (and only if) such action in equal-equal jural relationships is an initiation of coercion. Yes, what counts as initiation of coercion among equals varies with historical context, but whatever any particular jural-dualistic context recognizes as initiation of coercion among equals will, on the jural logic of one’s own, pin down what counts as such when done by the jural superior. This logic takes the historistic element onboard, and domesticates it.

The Liberty Principle and the Liberty Maxim

The liberty principle says: In a choice between two reforms (one of which may be no reform at all), the one that rates higher in liberty better serves universal benevolence. But Smith did not maintain the liberty principle as an axiom. Rather, it is defeasible. Smith, Hume, and Burke held that the principle holds only by and large, making a maxim. Thus, they give liberty a presumption, which like any presumption can be overcome when the prosecution overcomes the burden of proof. Some of the exceptions come because the greater direct-liberty option has indirect effects and ramifications that over time result in less liberty overall (Klein and Clark 2010, 2012). Many of Smith’s exceptions have an indirect-reduction-in-liberty element to their justification (Clark 2010).

Liberty enjoys a presumption, but so does something else, the status quo. The two presumptions are in tension for liberty-augmenting policy reforms, and they must moderate one another. The matter of how much of a presumption to give to the status quo makes another contextualization for a meaning of conservative; this “conservative” in policy reform relates to but should be distinguished from “conservative” in polity reformation. Hume, Smith, and Burke were conservative in polity reformation, but I would not assess them to have been particularly conservative in policy reform.

Liberal in Policy Reform

Dugald Stewart (1982, 311) wrote that works such as Smith’s Wealth of Nations “have aimed at the improvement of society, —not by delineating plans of new constitutions, but by enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Many scholars write explicitly of Smith’s pro-liberty “presumption” or “burden of proof.”[2] Almost all of Smith’s exceptions are endorsements of status-quo policy.

Hume says that after “fixing and observing” the rules of commutative justice “there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord” (T 3.2.2.12). Hume was not dogmatic; thus Roger Emerson says that Hume’s “laissez faire was one with qualifications” (28). But the assessment of Russell Hardin (2007) ought not be controversial: “[Hume] thinks that government should be kept small and not intrusive, as he argues in his varied essays on economics” (200).[3]

In policy reform, Burke too was a liberal. His posthumous “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” is his only work focused on political economy, and it is plainly and strongly favorable to the presumption of liberty and free markets. He speaks of government intervention as “coercion” (1999c, 61, 70; 1992, 161), saying that beneficial “timely coercion” is something that government owes to the people. Russell Kirk (1997) said that Burke “steadfastly opposed all policies calculated to reduce private liberties” (147), and he repeatedly calls Burke a “liberal” (161; Kirk 1960, 20, 22, 214). Samuel Huntington (1957) wrote: “[I]nsofar as Burke had views on the desirable organization of society, he was a liberal, a Whig, and a free trader” (461). Yuval Levin explains that Burke the parliamentarian “was, above all, a reformer,” and suggests that Burke represents what he calls “conservative liberalism” (2014, 9, 229; Levin 2019).

On the word liberal, Burke was in the post-1776 Smithian semantic fold.[4] In the 1777 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol he spoke of “the liberal government of this free nation” (p. 16). In a 1778 letter he writes that “the prosperity which arises from an enlarged and liberal system improves all its objects: and the participation of a trade with flourishing Countries is much better than a monopoly of want and penury” (1961, 426). In 1778 Burke speaks of the “liberality in the commercial system” (1999c, 33). In the Reflections he speaks significantly of “a liberal descent,” (1999a, 123), a moment that Gertrude Himmelfarb aptly seizes as liberal in our sense (1986, 167-173). Burke declaims against the new revolutionary assembly in France: “Their liberty is not liberal” (1999a, 174); and: “It is a vile illiberal school, this new French academy of the sans culottes” (1992, 299).

Whether Burke was a Smithian liberal in policy reform is a question that would have to consider not only his discourse but all of his activity as a politician, issue by issue. I attempt a first pass in Klein (2020a). Burke’s exceptions seem to be related to the needs of practical politics or to his polity conservatism. Gregory Collins (2017) mounts a case for Burke as an economic liberal and concludes: “While these objections show that Burke did not promote abstract natural rights theory animated by orthodox laissez faire doctrine, they do not contradict Burke’s endorsement of market freedom” (588).

Conservative in Polity Reformation

Burke in his last years saw polity radicalism run amok in France and surge as “armed doctrine…in every country” (1999b, 76). In attacking polity radicalism – which makes men “little better than the flies of summer” (1999a, 191) – he expounded a polity conservatism, in Reflections, Appeal, Regicide Peace, and lesser works (Burke 1992). As for Hume and Smith, I think that polity conservatism can be said to go for them, too.

There are general arguments for polity conservatism:

(1) Established ways have been through a historical process, of selection and survival and adaptation, that reflects, albeit highly imperfectly, functional goodness. “Our patience will atchieve more than our force” (Burke 1999a, 275).

(2) To some extent goodness is historistic and established ways are good because they are established.

(3) The citizen’s knowledge is slight, as is that of the social theorist or reformer, and such knowledge is highly conditioned by experience and practice; the consequences of a proposed polity innovation, or even its true nature, are scarcely known. Political projectors are subject to “innumerable delusions” (WN, 687.51). Rampant delusion throws politics into the hazards of collective foolishness and opportunistic abuse.

(4) Happiness depends on tranquility, which depends on confidence. Confidence in living depends on rules certainty and stability. Every reformation excuses, arouses, and inspires a next reformation, reducing certainty, stability, confidence, and the quality of life.

(5) Bad reformations are not easily corrected: Their badness enjoys plausible deniability and is stubbornly denied (Burke 1992, 92-93). Also, they breed interest groups who stoutly defend them.

Yet Smith, Hume, and Burke were ready to take up the burden of proof and espouse reformations. In the regular course of things the changes are conceived as adaptations and improvements, not transformations. “I would make the reparation as nearly as possible in the style of the building” (Burke 1999a, 363).

Polity conservatism has its starkest contrast in polity radicalism. But another contrast might be called polity loutishness. In former days I did not think enough about the dependence of liberty and liberalism on stable and functional polity; I did not much consider the polity-reformation dimension. In proud consistency to a too-simple assemblage of principles, and in an unwillingness to face up to humankind’s susceptibility to atavistic cohesionist politics, polity loutishness might tend toward inappositeness, indifference, denial, dupedom, or appeasement in the face of polity recklessness, mischief, or radicalism, when what is called for is recognition and, often, forthright opposition. Burke excels in calling out polity louts.

Concluding Remark

Conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians see today that, in politics, even in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, one cannot take basic functionality and procedural fairness for granted. And we have seen that, since the Nobel heyday of Hayek and Friedman, the merits of individual liberty and small government have not won mass popularity and favor, and the academic class is mainly adverse. I think that Hume and Smith sensed that “the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice,” “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way” (WN 664.3) would always face deep-seated, instinctual mass opposition, and Burke perceived “a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France” (1999b, 76, 157). The polity will always be pervaded by immense factions who, in their denial and self-deceit, work willy-nilly towards greater governmentalization of social affairs. The conservative liberalism of Smith, Hume, and Burke is as relevant in our day as it was in theirs.


References

Buckle, Stephen. 1991. Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Burke, Edmund. 1777 [1904]. Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. Ed. J.H. Moffatt. Philadelphia: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge.

Burke, Edmund. 1961. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Vol. III. Ed. G.H. Guttridge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Burke, Edmund. 1992. Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. D.E. Ritchie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Burke, Edmund. 1999a. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. E.J. Payne, F. Canavan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Burke, Edmund. 1999b. Letters on a Regicide Peace. Ed. E.J. Payne, F. Canavan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Burke, Edmund. 1999c. Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. F. Canavan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Clark, Michael J. 2010. The Virtuous Discourse of Adam Smith: The Political Economist’s Measued Words on Public Policy. PhD dissertation, George Mason University Department of Ecnomics. Link

Collins, Gregory M. 2017. Edmund Burke on the Question of Commercial Intercourse in the Eighteenth Century. Review of Politics 79: 565-595.

Collins, Gregory M. 2019c. Burke’s Political Economy Reconsidered. Law & Liberty, November 21. Link

Diesel, Jonathan H. 2020a. Two Superiors, Two Jural Relationships in Adam Smith. Adam Smith Review, forthcoming.

Diesel, Jonathan H. 2020b. A Call to Embrace Jural Dualism. Society, forthcoming.

Emerson, Roger. L. The Scottish Contexts for David Hume’s Political-Economic Thinking. In David Hume’s Political Economy, eds. Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas. London: Routledge: 10-30.

Griswold, Charles L. 1999. Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Haakonssen, Knud. 1981. The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haakonssen, Knud. 1996. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hardin, Russell. 2007. David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1967. Studies in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1986. Marriage and Morals among the Victorians. New York: Knopf.

Hollander, Samuel. 1973. The Economics of Adam Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Hume, David. 1983. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Edited by W.B. Todd. 6 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Hume, David. 1994. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Hume, David. 1998. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hume, David. 2007. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Huntington, Samuel. 1957. Conservatism as an Ideology. American Political Science Review 51(2): 454-473.

Kirk, Russell. 1960. The Conservative Mind. Third ed. Chicago: Regnery.

Kirk, Russell. 1997. Edmond Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Klein, Daniel B. 2020a. Conservative Liberalism: Hume, Smith, and Burke as Policy Liberals and Polity Conservatives. GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 2020-07SSRN paper, submitted to special issue of Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Link

Klein, Daniel B. 2020b. Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative Justice in Adam Smith. Adam Smith Review, forthcoming. Link

Klein, Daniel B. 2019. Liberalism 1.0. (A PowerPoint file and video presentation as part of a debate with Helen Rosenblatt at Timbro, Stockholm, May 2019). https://www.facebook.com/tankesmedjantimbro/videos/389066258485074/

Klein, Daniel B. and Michael J. Clark. 2010. Direct and Overall Liberty: Areas and Extent of Disagreement, w/ M.J. Clark. Reason Papers 32, Fall: 41-66.

Klein, Daniel B. and Michael J. Clark. 2012. Direct and Overall Liberty: Replies to Walter Block and Claudia Williamson, w/Michael Clark, Reason Papers 34(2): Oct.: 133-143.

Klein, Daniel B. and Erik W. Matson. 2019. Mere-Liberty in David Hume. A Companion to David Hume. Ed. Moris Polanco. Guatemala City: Universidad Francisco Marroquin. Link

Levin, Yuval. 2014. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. New York: Basic Books.

Levin, Yuval. 2019. Burke and the Nation. Law and Liberty Blog, July 19. https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/19/burke-and-the-nation/

Miller, David. 1981. Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.

Otteson, James. 2016. Adam Smith and the Right. In Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, ed. by R.P. Hanley, ch. 29. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pocock, J.G.A. 1983. Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-century Social Thought. In Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), 235-52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pocock, J.G.A. 1985. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Adam. 1976. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Adam. 1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Craig. 2013. Adam Smith: Left or Right? Political Studies 61: 784-798.

Stewart, Dugald. 1854. Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe. In The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. 1, William Hamilton (ed.). Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co.

Stewart, Dugald. 1982. Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D. In Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W.P.D. Wightman: 265-351. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Viner, Jacob. 1927. Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire. Journal of Political Economy 35(2): 198-232.

Young, Jeffrey T. and Barry Gordon. 1996. Distributive Justice as a Normative Criterion in Adam Smith’s Political Economy. History of Political Economy 28(1): 1-25.



Notes

[1.] For “violence of law” and like remarks see WN 525-526.4-5, 248.9, 285.31, 342.30, 372.32, 422.16, 586.52, 653.28, 647-8.17

[2.] E.g., Viner 1927, 219; Hollander 1973, 256; Young and Gordon 1996, 22; Griswold 1999, 295; C. Smith 2013, 796; Otteson 2016, 508.

[3.] On Hume as a policy liberal, see Klein and Matson 2019.

[4.] On the Smithian semantic “liberal” fold, see Klein 2019.



This was originally published in Liberty Matters.


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Tocqueville and Newman feared what C. S. Lewis would describe, a century after them, as “men without chests.”

Suffer the Little Children

by Geoffrey M. Vaughan
The pandemic will end, and yet Covid-19 will remain in some form or other. Much of life will return to normal, except for those seeking the chimera of “zero-covid.” But what kinds of men and women will we have produced?
St. John Henry Newman advised in his Idea of a University that, if forced to choose, it would be better to abolish the classrooms and fire the instructors than close the dormitories and dining halls. Students, he argued, learn more through conversations with their peers than through what we today call “content delivery.”

I have overheard enough dining hall conversations to know that Newman’s recommendation exaggerates the quality of those encounters. Plato’s Euthyphro is rarely the topic of choice for students enjoying their third hamburger of the week on a Wednesday. Whether his picture of undergraduate life is hyperbolic or our reality shambolic, we have with notable exceptions chosen the opposite of what he recommended.

At the start of the pandemic in March of 2020, colleges and universities throughout the country shut down all personal encounters, closed the doors to the dining halls, and went online. All the “content” was delivered through the internet. In the Fall of that year, most tried to find ways to have some students in the classrooms with a hybrid model (half the class in the room and half online), but the social aspects that Newman endorsed were significantly curtailed.

A year later, now 18 months into the pandemic, with a vaccine widely available and mandated at most institutions—usually over 90% compliance among students, often more among staff—the nation’s colleges and universities are still focused on content delivery over conversation. The rules are, in some cases, more draconian than they were a year ago.

Adults or Children?

Brown University, one of the Ivies in case you forgot, enacted further restrictions in response to what it described as “82 confirmed positive COVID-19 asymptomatic tests in the past seven days.” Brown has over 7,000 undergraduates and 3,000 graduates. 82 asymptomatic test results, or just over 1% of undergraduates or less than that of all students, induced further restrictions. What are those restrictions?

There are effectively no dining halls at Brown anymore. All their dining services are take-out and students are strongly discouraged from going to restaurants off campus. What’s more, they have been instructed to restrict their social encounters. Under the heading of “Refrain from Small-Group ‘Hopping,’” they have been given the following instruction: “Students are expected to consistently engage with the same small social group, rather than attending or “hopping” among multiple small-group gatherings over the course of a day or short period of time.” Are these young adults or little children?

I pick on Brown only because they are so honest. Their rules are openly posted online and, what’s more, they admit in those very rules that, “there is no evidence of spread in classrooms.” Such evidence has not stopped other institutions, my own included, from requiring vaccines, masks inside and out, multiple PCR tests per week, and all sorts of other restrictions. Brown is not an outlier, by any means. Some colleges and universities are now more restrictive than nursing homes.

The New Schoolmasters

What will be the result of all this? There is no way to know. Maybe all that “content” will be delivered as hoped and students now in university will thrive in their careers. But we can see a certain type of person being cultivated and formed by our rules and policies. Students are now asking, even demanding that their institutions impose mandates on them or, more precisely, on others. Graduate students in Iowa staged a “die in” to demand stricter measures. For many of these young people, the policies do not go far enough.

An older instructor I know, teaching part time at a university I shall not name, was having a very hard time hearing students through the mandatory mutual masks. He asked students to briefly pull down their masks when asking questions. For doing so he was anonymously reported to the administration by a student. The student was only following orders. Reporting infractions is university policy. Cancel culture has been extended to Covid rules, reducing even more of our interactions to crossing minefields.

It is assumed, especially after the heroism shown after 9/11, that crises bring out the best in people. They do, if they elicit courage. They don’t, if we respond with its opposite.

Forget for the moment the policy of masking vaccinated eighteen-year-olds. If a student really was so scared of speaking one sentence without a mask, leave it on. Maybe parents don’t ask their children this question anymore, but would you jump off a bridge if a professor asked you to? That sort of compliance is dangerous, but so is the other part, reporting him.

We have taught young people to fear power and worship it. On the one hand, they fear the power of a teacher so much that they do not object at the time to things they find life-threatening. On the other, they turn to anonymous tip lines, hoping that bureaucratic processes will save their lives. Never more true were Tocqueville’s words, “I do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters.”

Tocqueville’s Prophecy

American education has not been attentive to the development of citizens of a democratic republic for quite some time, but the last eighteen months have been especially poor in this regard. All of the pathologies of individualism endemic to democracy have been exacerbated by the online classes, masks, and enforced distancing. Classmates, teammates, and simple friends have been “distanced”: “the bond of human affections is extended and loosened.”

Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw this danger and described it only a dozen years before Newman’s warning about promoting delivery over conversation. Writing of the soft despotism to which democracies are prone, we can see in his words the present condition of our universities: “it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” Some may dispute the tyrannizing part, but the rest seems to be perfectly accurate.

Tocqueville and Newman feared what C. S. Lewis would describe, a century after them, as “men without chests.” Admitting that the Oxford education he described in his book was not the ideal moral education, Newman could see that it formed characters that would not be bent or bowed:
but if I must determine which of the two courses was the more successful in training, moulding, enlarging the mind, which sent out men the more fitted for their secular duties, which produced better public men, men of the world, men whose names would descend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that University which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun. (Idea of a University, VI.9)
The pandemic will end, and yet Covid-19 will remain in some form or other. Much of life will return to normal, except for those seeking the chimera of “zero-covid.” But what kinds of men and women will we have produced? We can get a good indication from the recent episode of a rude encounter New Yorkers used to take pride in. Frederick Joseph claimed to be on the receiving end of racially charged remarks by a woman on the street. He filmed the latter half of the encounter and put it online with the express intention of getting her fired from her job. It worked, of course, and he was pleased with the result.

It is assumed, especially after the heroism shown after 9/11, that crises bring out the best in people. They do, if they elicit courage. They don’t, if we respond with its opposite. And in bringing out the worst, this crisis has fallen into the pattern of much of contemporary American society: make the children suffer.

From easy divorce to failing schools, from Instagram’s knowingly deleterious effect on young girls to the Irreversible Damage of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (a study suppressed by the same Brown University that has closed all of its dining halls because of 82 asymptomatic test results), American society is quick to allow the children to suffer. That was not the intended meaning of Matthew 19:14.

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Chantal Delsol: «La ecología se ha convertido en una religión para sustituir al cristianismo»


Sin Dios, la sociedad no cae en el nihilismo sino en el paganismo, dice la filósofa francesa

ReL



La ampliación del plazo para abortar a las catorce semanas, la eutanasia... Las leyes sociales que van tomando forma lo revelan más que nunca: se impone una nueva moral. ¿Cómo explicarlo? Una civilización de dieciséis siglos, el cristianismo, está "agonizando", explica Chantal Delsol.

En La Fin de la chrétienté, la filósofa demuestra que la moral se está transformando por una inversión normativa similar a la que lanzaron los primeros cristianos. La trascendencia está desapareciendo, el paganismo está volviendo, otra idea del hombre está tomando forma... Un libro esclarecedor sobre el fin de una era que conduce a otro mundo, que algunos encontrarán escalofriante.

Anne-Laure Debaecker la ha entrevistado para Valeurs Actuelles:

-Según un sondeo de Ifop publicado el 23 de septiembre, el 51% de los franceses ya no creen en Dios. ¿Qué piensa usted?

-Es muy difícil hacer una encuesta sobre las creencias, que son íntimas y fluctúan. Sin embargo, podemos ver claramente la desaparición de las creencias cristianas en Occidente, y esto ha sido así desde hace ya varios siglos. Sin embargo, hoy en día la caída de las prácticas religiosas es significativa. Hemos entrado en una nueva era. Pero no nos vamos a convertir en ateos, todos los pueblos son religiosos y ninguno puede prescindir de las creencias, aunque no sean religiones constituidas.

»Muchos cristianos piensan que después de ellos llegará el nihilismo, la nada. Pero se equivocan. Ninguna cultura vive del nihilismo, no existe. En su estado natural, todas las sociedades humanas son "paganas", si se quiere politeístas, con múltiples creencias inmanentes. El monoteísmo (judío, cristiano) es la excepción, con un Dios único y trascendente. Cuando el monoteísmo se desvanece, la sociedad vuelve naturalmente a formas de paganismo, que nacen por sí solas, que son, si se me permite decirlo, el caldo primigenio. Ahí es donde estamos. 

-¿Qué religión es cada vez más frecuente?

-La ecología, una forma de cosmoteísmo, es la principal religión de nuestro tiempo. Naturalmente, los graves problemas ecológicos que hoy nos preocupan son cuestiones científicas, basadas en datos científicos. Pero lo que ocurre es que esta ciencia da lugar a una religión ecológica, o se transforma en una religión ecológica. Es decir, se ve superada por creencias y miedos que la minan y la perjudican, e incluso cuestionan su veracidad. Hoy en día, la ecología funciona como una religión: tiene sus sumos sacerdotes y sus misas, su catecismo enseñado a los niños, su profetisa, sus excomuniones y anatemas.

»El mero hecho, por ejemplo, de que se prohíba hablar a los escépticos del clima demuestra que las creencias religiosas están ocupando el lugar del pensamiento científico. En principio, la ciencia no teme a sus oponentes: discute los argumentos, no lanza anatemas. Creo que la ecología se ha convertido en una religión para sustituir al cristianismo, que ha sido borrado. Es una forma de panteísmo, y la religión común hoy en día es el panteísmo, o el cosmoteísmo si se quiere: la gente abraza a los árboles o adora a las ballenas, los himnos a la Madre Tierra, etc.

»Nuestra contemporaneidad ha borrado por completo la trascendencia y adora este mundo. He puesto el ejemplo de la Carta a Diogneto, de los inicios del cristianismo, donde el autor anónimo le dice a Diogneto que los cristianos son en este mundo "extranjeros domiciliados", es decir, que los cristianos aspiran a otro mundo. Nuestros contemporáneos ya no quieren ser "extranjeros domiciliados", ya no quieren que esta tierra sea una "estancia" y el más allá la única "morada", quieren que esta tierra sea su "morada". 

-¿Cómo define usted el cristianismo, que es el tema de su nuevo libro? ¿Cuál es su legado?

-La cristiandad es la civilización que tiene como fuente y fundamento el cristianismo o incluso el judeocristianismo, sin olvidar las antiguas influencias. Comenzó a finales del siglo IV con el reinado de Teodosio: la moral cristiana se impuso a todos y las leyes del Imperio se inspiraron directamente en los dogmas cristianos. Terminó en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, con las leyes de transformación social.

»Puede decirse que el cristianismo contribuyó a producir la Ilustración y fue destruido por ella, que es su hijo salvaje e indomable. No existe la Ilustración en otras culturas. Es un producto cristiano, que mata a un padre que se quedó demasiado antiguo. Actualmente nos encontramos en el despliegue exponencial, a menudo aberrante y utópico, del espíritu emancipador de la Ilustración.

Portada de 'La fin de la Chrétienté' de Chantal Delsol.

Chantal Delsol (1947) es una de las más notables figuras de la intelectualidad francesa. Profesora emérita de la Universidad de Marne-la-Vallée y directora del Instituto de investigación Hannah Arendt, es miembro de la Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas y autora de varios libros. Colabora habitualmente en Le Figaro y Valeurs Actuelles. En España se ha publicado su ensayo Populismos. Una defensa de lo indefendible.

»El cristianismo nos inculcó la idea de una dirección en el tiempo, que se convirtió en progreso con la Ilustración, y estamos en proceso de volver al tiempo cíclico y apocalíptico (a los niños se les enseña el próximo apocalipsis en el jardín de infancia). El cristianismo nos inculcó una dignidad humana sustancial, y empezamos a pensar que los animales son tan dignos como los humanos. El cristianismo nos inculcó la idea platónica de la verdad, y estamos abusando de ella y volviendo, en muchos sentidos, a la era de los mitos. 

-Su análisis se centra en el final de este cristianismo: ¿qué fue lo que marcó su fin hizo sonar su campana de muerte?

-Es una larga agonía que probablemente comenzó en el Renacimiento, alcanzó un punto de inflexión crítico en la época de la Ilustración y luego se ha confirmado en los dos últimos siglos. 

-También señala usted que incluso el pensamiento cristiano ha ido renunciando al cristianismo: ¿cómo y por qué?

-Sí, es sorprendente ver hasta qué punto los propios cristianos, empezando por el clero, ya no están interesados en defender todo lo que significaba el cristianismo en términos de poder. La historia juega aquí un papel importante: en la primera mitad del siglo XX, el cristianismo intentó sobrevivir a través de regímenes fascistas corporativistas, que resultaron ser bárbaros.

»En general, los cristianos y sus clérigos son hijos de su tiempo: ya no queremos el dominio de la fuerza, ya no queremos conquistar, ni política ni religiosamente. Y hoy existe una vergüenza en la Iglesia por las conquistas cristianas históricas, al igual que existe una vergüenza en nuestras sociedades por las conquistas políticas históricas. Si le diijeras a una asamblea de obispos que el cristianismo ha muerto, creo que te responderían interiormente: "¡Que les vaya bien ¡Ya era hora!". 

Chantal Delsol, en un debate radiofónico sobre la cuestión que aborda en su libro: el final de la Cristiandad y lo que va a sustituirla.

-Sobre el tema del rechazo a las leyes de influencia cristiana, usted menciona una inversión normativa, ¿de qué se trata?

-Es una inversión de las normas morales, que todos habrán notado. Durante un siglo, todo se ha invertido. Después de muchas aventuras, el divorcio ha pasado de estar prohibido a facilitarse. El aborto estaba penalizado, ahora está legitimado. También se legitima la homosexualidad. La Iglesia no ofrecía funerales a los suicidas, nosotros aspiramos ahora al suicidio asistido, que sin duda pronto se legitimará. La pena de muerte fue legitimada, es criminal. La tortura fue un último recurso parche, un daño colateral de la guerra: es un crimen. La pederastia también era un daño colateral: es un delito (¿próximamente imprescriptible?). Estas inversiones marcan el fin de las creencias subyacentes, que eran cristianas. Marcan la entrada en una nueva sociedad, con creencias diferentes. 

-¿Por qué compara a los cristianos de los siglos XIX y XX con los paganos del siglo IV?

-Quería mostrar que en el siglo IV el cristianismo naciente realizó la misma inversión, pero en sentido contrario: por ejemplo, penalizó el infanticidio y la homosexualidad, y prohibió el divorcio. Lo que ocurre hoy no es una ruptura inédita. Ha habido otras. Siempre es el cambio de creencias el que lleva al cambio de leyes sobre la moral. Las reformas sociales actuales suponen una revisión: durante décadas, las leyes cristianas se aplicaron a mentes que ya no tienen las correspondientes creencias cristianas. 

-¿Cómo podemos definir esta nueva moral que se está imponiendo?

-En algunos aspectos, retoma la moral evangélica, pero sin la trascendencia y de forma exponencial, porque ya no dispone de antropología y cree que todo es posible. Por ejemplo, la igualdad y la benevolencia se retoman y se desarrollan en exceso, sin tener en cuenta la realidad. Chesterton llamó a esto verdades cristianas enloquecidas. Varios autores (SchelerKolnai) han hablado de humanitarismo para describir esta moral originada en el cristianismo pero que se ha vuelto errática e ilimitada. No es humanismo, ya que el humanismo significa la primacía del hombre y nosotros ya no creemos en la primacía del hombre. La transformación del protestantismo en evangelio social en Norteamérica ha sido bien estudiada. Los vicios que eran la envidia, el orgullo, la intemperancia, se han convertido en: imperialismo, colonialismo, homofobia. Ahí hay una especie de transposición extravagante. 

-¿Cómo podemos explicar el auge de las religiones asiáticas?

-Ninguna sociedad puede prescindir de la religión: el ser humano es una criatura demasiado consciente de su propia tragedia como para no imaginar misterios detrás de la puerta. Por eso, cuando tiene necesidad de religión (como es nuestro caso), va a buscarla a otra parte. Esto siempre ha sido así. Hoy, con el desvanecimiento de las religiones de nuestros padres, las espiritualidades asiáticas están en el momento adecuado para ofrecer a nuestros contemporáneos necesitados la ayuda que necesitan. 

-¿Cuál es el lugar de los cristianos en nuestro mundo moderno? Encontrarse en una sociedad cuyas leyes y moral se desaprueban es tener la tentación de ceder al fatalismo y replegarse en su propio espacio... ¿Deben seguir manifestándose para expresar su oposición a las leyes sociales? ¿Deben tratar de hacer oír su voz, de luchar por un mundo que les parezca mejor?

-Sí, hablamos de exculturación: vivir en una sociedad cuya cultura no aprobamos. Esta es la eterna situación de la minoría, que no es fácil, que tiene sus leyes, su grandeza y sus miserias. Los católicos necesitan tomar algunas lecciones de los judíos y los protestantes. Pero esto no responde a la vocación misionera del cristianismo: creo que se es tanto o más misionero por ser testigo que por ser prosélito.

Traducción de Elena Faccia Serrano.

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