A Living Text

In a review of several books about Theodor Adorno, Michael Rosen wrote the following:

In Adorno’s view, Nazism points towards a horrifying fact about the nature of European civilization itself. European civilization has acted as a cradle for ideals of equality and respect for humanity, ideals that have inspired great social movements as well as Europe’s most profound works of art. And yet it produced in Germany, a nation that had contributed to that culture in the highest degree, a regime in which human being treated their Jewish fellow citizens as so much disposable rubbish.

[Adorno wrote] Auschwitz has irrefutably demonstrated the failure of culture. That it could happen surrounded by the entire tradition of philosophy, art and the sciences-the mind-signifies more than just that they were not able to assert themselves and change human beings. Those very disciplines with their claim to independent validity are the home of the falsehood. All culture after Auschwitz-the radical critique of culture included -is rubbish.

Two things stand out to me: the inability of humanity to understand human nature apart from the doctrine of original sin, and the inability of culture to save man aside from the worship of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The idea of human goodness seems to span all religions and thought forms, and is inherent in modern day messianic beliefs such as that Obama will save America, or that America will save the world. Mankind is evil to its core, and apart from regeneration, is hopelessly bent on evil. But no amount of experience seems to drill this home, so the lesson has to be learned again and again. The current American mantra of “believe in yourself” is the ultimate rejection of original sin. There is nothing in yourself to believe in, cast your hopes upon the risen Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, in order for there to be any hope of progress.

A simple idea from Simon Blackburn: the truth of a proposition consists of its correspondence to fact.

In his book Democracy-The God that Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe provides these axioms:

Human action is an actor’s purposeful pursuit of valued ends with scarce means. No on can purposefully not act. Every action is aimed at improving the actor’s subjective well-being above what it otherwise would have been. A larger quantity of a good is valued more highly than a smaller quantity of the same good. Satisfaction earlier is preferred over satisfaction later. Production must precede consumption. What is consumed now cannot be consumed again in the future. If the price of a good is lowered, either the same quantity or more will be bought than otherwise. Prices fixed below market clearing prices will lead to lasting shortages. Without private property in factors of production there can be no factor prices, and without factor prices cost-accounting is impossible. Taxes are an imposition on producers and / or wealth owners and reduce production and / or wealth below what it otherwise would have been. Interpersonal conflict is possible only if and insofar as things are scarce. No thing or part of a thing can be owned exclusively by more than one person at a time. Democracy (majority rule) is incompatible with private property (individual ownership and rule). No form of taxation can be uniform (equal), but every taxation involves the creation of two distinct and unequal classes of taxpayers versus taxreceiver-consumers. Property and property titles are distinct entities, and an increase of the latter without a corresponding increase of the former does not raise social wealth but leads to redistribution of existing wealth.

R.J. Rushdoony wrote this some years ago, but it is a timeless truth:

Everything associated with roots and certainty is today despised by the self-styled new elite. Marriage, morality, family, law, order, certainty, and above all, Christianity, are hated with a passion. Man’s freedom is to avoid all certainty except himself; the quest for certainty is seens as the quest for death. Life for these men means uncertainty and rootlessness. One student radical has remarked, “I hate people who know anything.” The hatred of certainty is a major passion of existentialist man.

This hatred of roots and of certainty is basic to revolutionary activity. The revolutionist destroys things of value precisely because they have a value apart from him. Only what he decrees can stand. The revolutionist destroys roots, values, and laws because they speak of certainty, and he is at war with certainty.

Modernity tells us that we are to help the whole world, all men everywhere, or those in distant lands suffering some plight. Those with the means and time to do so may indeed extend their charity to the distant, but our primary duty is to take care of our family, those in our parish, and those whom we know - this is the sphere of life that God has given us. St. Augustine says:

All people should be loved equally. But you cannot do good to all people equally, so you should take particular thought for those who, as if by lot, happen to be particularly close to you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstances. (On Christian Teaching)

St. Paul told Timothy the same thing:

Aristotle writes in The Nicomachean Ethics:

Nevertheless it seems clear that happiness needs the addition of external goods, as we have said; for it is difficult if not impossible to do fine deeds without any resources. Many can only be done as it were by insturments - by the help of friends, or wealth, or political influence.

I do not think that this flies in the face of the Gospel, though at first blush it may seem to contradict the idea of our reward being in the Resurrection, in eternity with God. The reason being that Aristotle is not talking about eating grapes from a servant, driving a Hummer, living on an ocean-going yacht, or other displays of ostentation. He means that to do good requires money. Someone has to pay to build a church, send a missionary, clothe the poor, help those crushed with debt, and so forth. God has supplied the world with the rich in order that they might do good to His household, the Church and through the Church to the world. If the rich are instead spending on their own pleasures and are not contemplating the good (in this case the Holy Trinity), then they are by definition not happy, as they are not pursuing the good life.

I became fully persuaded that there is neither in me or in any Man else any natural Faculty by which we may discover Truth with a full and certain assurance and that the Cause of all our Errors is the too hasty Propensity of our Minds which makes us too easily believe what ever Notions are proposed to us

- from A Philosophical Treatise Concerning the Weakness of Human Understanding By Pierre-Daniel Huet

Philip Bess sums up the tradition on the good life:

the good life for individual human beings is the life of individual moral and intellectual virtue (or excellence) lived with others in communities. Aristotle himself characterized the four components of the good life as good health, sufficient wealth to satisfy our bodily needs, good habits, and good fortune.

Also:

the city (is) the foremost community that exists for the sake of the good life.

From here:

“Much of what happens in history”, he notes, “comes from ‘Black Swan dynamics’, very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable ‘outliers’, while much of what we usually talk about is almost pure noise. Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; yet by some mechanism called the hindsight bias we think that we understand them. We have a bad habit of finding ‘laws’ in history (by fitting stories to events and detecting false patterns); we are drivers looking through the rear view mirror while convinced we are looking ahead.”

James Jordan has repeatedly argued that one reason we are not to bow to images is that the human person is a deep construct - we have levels within us that we are not even aware of. We don’t know all the reasons why God says to do or not do something, but we can assume that it is important if he says it because he knows our make up far better then we do. Bowing to statues and pictures does something to us over time that we are not aware of. This news may uncover some of the reasons why it matter. It says in part:

The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is “embodied cognition,” and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding - and enhancing - the abilities of the human mind. Some educators see in it a new paradigm for teaching children, one that privileges movement and simulation over reading, writing, and reciting. Specialists in rehabilitative medicine could potentially use the emerging findings to help patients recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions - not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct - on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.

“It’s a revolutionary idea,” says Shaun Gallagher, the director of the cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida. “In the embodied view, if you’re going to explain cognition it’s not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what’s going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what’s going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment.”

Or, as the motto of the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory of Embodied Cognition puts it, “Ago ergo cogito”: “I act, therefore I think.”