I’ve had a lot to say about that, actually, and could say a lot more:

• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2014/10/03/rehabilitation
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/01/22/this-exam-only-needs-one-question
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/01/28/courts-pretty-definitely-right-bigots-quite-certainly-disgusting
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/04/01/torches-and-pitchforks
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/04/02/on-not-being-base-vile-or-poltroonish
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/12/17/perverse-vindication-is-vindication-still
• inkan.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/fruits-which-the-good-and-wise-bitterly-deplore
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/dont-use-exclamation-points
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/kulturkampf-is-just-what-it-says
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/dont-expect-torch-and-pitchfork-crowds-to-behave-consistently
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/the-banality-of-nihilism
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/there-are-nerds-and-then-there-are-bigots
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/christian-resistance-to-unlawful-authority-a-brief-sourcebook-with-pictures
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/on-resistance
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/you-cant-sleep-with-dignity-on-procrustes-bed
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/12/19/love-among-slaves
• inkan.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/unjust-discrimination-must-be-avoided
• inkanblot.com/blog/public-personal/brilliantly-spoken-and-true
• inkanblot.com/blog/public-personal/defenestrating-institutionalized-evil-one-clever-devil-at-a-time
• inkanblot.com/blog/reflections/on-theology/why-you-must-understand-analogy-or-the-misrule-of-bad-metaphors

We are not wrong to recognize our frustration–literally, the lack of efficacy or support for our intentions, their failure to achieve fruition, and our sense that the indifference of some, the excuse-making of others, the fecklessness of many, and our own lack of resolve are all part of the problem.

It is very important to take the measure of the situation.  I think we all need a much heavier dose of sobriety than we are usually given, in popular culture or even at church:  [see “The Problem of Nihilism in Public Discourse” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and “The Banality of Nihilism” for more.]

But at some point, some good person always asks the right question:  what, then, are we to do?  The question is perennial, and gets asked from many angles.  There are plenty of resources to suggest a direction for tackling this question.

Still, This “what to do” question is harder to answer that than to be dismayed at the difficulty of answering.  It takes time to dig down into the faith, into the hope we really do have, to find its subtler connections to our everyday situation–the options between martyrdom proper and practical-atheist complacency that we navigate creatively together in pursuit of our holy calling.

Herewith, then, a few steps.

1. Sober up

“Realism” should not make you ignore the big picture–the really big picture, the one with God in it and your responsibilities to your family and your neighbors in it, the one where your prayers matter but cannot be unmoored from your concrete obligations, the one that is true even if the statistics and the promises and the conjectures of the chatterers and the pitchers and the candidates, Hucksters and Trumperies and all, prove as false as their all-too-human (and often corrupt and criminal) opposition claims.  You are not choosing between options presented you on TV, unless you have succumbed to the mistaken notion that TV is a window on reality, forgetting that TV news exists to sell your attention span to advertisers.  That’s right, folks.  The mass media buy and sell your attention spans as surely as markets for the securitization of debt buy and sell the poor.

So stop believing them.  Stop judging things in their terms.  Find out who makes the real decisions, and focus your attention and advocacy on their reasoning and actions.

Do not believe that you know something about reality when you know what “wins the game” in horse-race handicapping of campaigns, or in hypothetical vote counting and prediction, or in staging the confrontations and feeding the “narratives” that make for good attention-span sales and bolster the self-importance and saleability of those with the media muscle to make or break celebrity brands.  What you know is how to manipulate the delusions of others.  If you need to do that, then do it knowing that is what you are doing; do it effectively and ruthlessly, all the while *also* being sure that you are honest with yourself and about yourself.  This is light years away from what happens when most people enter politics, or from what we naively assume in typical news-driven political conversation.

Quit thinking in cliches, even if you have to spout a slogan here and there to rally the troops.

2. Think your way in from the edges

We don’t want, and shouldn’t want, to live in fantasies of “what might be” or to spend too much time on our pipe dreams.  (Much as I love pipe dreams and Modest Proposals, and wish I had time to flesh them out more.)

But we also cannot make realistic judgments if we do not understand the parameters of the situation.  For this reason, reframing the question is a basic move in political debate, and the frame of various mass media (and social media) conversations ends up seeming more important than any of the actual decisions or the relevant data.  Not a few problems are much simpler than anyone involved has any interest in allowing them to be, sadly (e.g., bathrooms).  And some problems are constantly reframed as a debate over “solutions” when in fact nobody involved seems to have any serious idea what is to be done (e.g., entitlement reform).

Reframing isn’t bad, any more than any other rhetorical gesture is; the problem with this, as with any move from “slippery slope” to “appeal to authority,” has to do with the substantive question at hand and the effects of the gesture on our habits of thought.  When you can show us that beyond a certain threshold there is nothing that will prevent a predictable bad result, you are quite right to make a “slippery slope” argument–and that does not protect you in the least from being wrong about any particular one.  Rhetorical gestures are not magically “true” or “false”; they are honest/dishonest and apt/inapt, and always entirely contingent upon our knowledge of reality.

So in keeping with “Sober up,” we need to be ready to engage in proper reframing of our own.  When someone comes at you with a false choice, or assumes that X is inevitable unless you do Y that seems unacceptable, then you need to stop and analyze the total set of knowns, unknowns, and possibilities more carefully.  Has X really been decided, or can you reasonably advocate for Z (even if Z is unlikely) when you find Y unacceptable?  If so, you ought to do so.

And that means that you must become accustomed to doing something that is not acceptable in formal logic and academic debate, but essential in public discourse:  you must regularly, even habitually, reject the premise of arguments presented to you.

When people try to logic you into a corner, you must always suspect a false choice, interrogate them to understand the nature of the enthymeme, and search for an alternative that enables you to reject the (usually suppressed, because often implausible if stated) premise.

Therefore, a dialogue:

Jimmy:  We have to unite around Trump, because otherwise Hillary will get to pick the next Supreme Court Justices!
Jerry:  Do you think Trump can really beat Hillary?
Jimmy:  Well, not if we don’t unite around him!
Jerry:  Why don’t we reject him and pick someone else?
Jimmy:  But a convention fight would only weaken the GOP!
Jerry:  But wouldn’t Trump weaken the GOP?
Jimmy:  But Trump is our best chance for beating Hillary!
Jerry:  But will Trump actually be any better than Hillary?
Jimmy:  But he’ll have to rely on the GOP to win!
Jerry:  Why don’t we reject him and pick someone else?
Jimmy:  But whatever we do that weakens Trump helps Hillary!
Jerry:  How so?
Jimmy:  Well, you have to vote, don’t you?
Jerry:  Uh, no….
Jimmy:  But if you don’t vote, your vote gets wasted!
Jerry:  And if I vote for someone I think is bad for the country, my vote gets perverted, right?
Jimmy:  But not voting for Trump is the same as voting for Hillary!
Jerry:  Oh, really, how’s that work out mathematically?
Jimmy:  Well, if 100 people vote, and each side would have 50/50, and you take away two votes from one side, that make it 51/49 percent against that side!
Jerry:  Hmmm.  I’m not saying I would think it made sense substantively or morally even if those numbers were right, but…how are you getting your 100 people voting?  I mean, it’s not like we select exactly 100 voters per district or something…right?
Jimmy:  But however many people live in that place, that’s the total, and whoever doesn’t vote for one side is helping the other.
Jerry:  What if most of the people, or even a sizeable plurality of the people, don’t vote?
Jimmy:  Well, then we just count the ones who are voting.
Jerry:  But if we only count after the vote, and only count the ones who voted, then how does your “take away” work?
Jimmy:  No, see, you start with the polls of likely voters, then you move from there to what actually happened, and your decision not to vote changed that “likely voter” poll outcome to be what really happened.  Your not-voting is like a vote for Hillary!
Jerry:  I’m pretty sure you just conflated fiction with reality, there.  Who’s buying the next round?

There is nothing “unrealistic” about insisting that we make the actual decision in front of us without conflating it with mass-media driven narratives about the meaning of polls and the relationship between various blips of reportage and the real decision-making.  Those stories are always going to inflate the importance of whatever aggrandizes the national news media and their corporate overlords, and will do so in a manner that promotes the celebrity brands (and not necessarily the principles or the interests) of those politicians and others who abet them in that highly profitable trade in human attention spans.

So that’s a start:  replace fiction with substance in your discourse and decision-making.  I’ll be back soon with more steps to take.

Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.

(source: Catechism of the Catholic Church – The sixth commandment)

I’ve said this in other ways at other times, but it bears saying again:  To help people, including making laws that govern society justly and mitigate the harms we do to each other, it is always necessary to avoid bigotry–self-serving, lawless unreason that treats others merely as objects of contempt or threats.  This is true regardless of the “others” involved.

And it is equally necessary to deal with people according to truth, to the conformity of our understanding and language to reality, to the proportioning of our projects and ambitions to what is actually possible.  When we do not do so, we do harm.

This is, for example, a reason not to hate and fear “Muslims” indiscriminately.  It is vital to discriminate between people who may, for reasons including devotion to false religion, do violent harm to others, and those who may be harmless (or in harm’s way) for reasons that may include their religion, whether we deem it true or false.  And therefore it is necessary that we never let our abstractions occlude simply human features of each situation, like indications of violent tendencies or affiliations, evidence of abuse, or other factors.

Each person deserves to be treated as someone with human dignity, that is, someone created in imago dei so as to be capable of entering into friendship with God:  someone with a “rational soul,” someone whose consequential choices, insofar as they express right relationship to God and other people, really do make each human creature the “kind of person” he or she becomes (a unique kind always analogous in kind to God and other people).

And that treatment most definitely does involve compassion for the suffering each person undergoes, both because of conditions no one can choose–like a skin color subject to cultural bigotry, or a nationality at war with another, or poverty in a nation that treats affluent consumerism as a social norm, or ignorance on account of miseducation–and because of choices whose consequences far outweigh what any human can calculate in advance.

People need to be treated with care, and helped to become open to the grace that will “heal and perfect nature” in each of us and in the whole world.

But precisely because none of us can fully calculate in advance the cost of the most consequential decisions we make, the ones that form our future in ways that may have lifelong or, barring that most merciful intervention of God that we pray for daily, eternal consequences, it is absolutely necessary that we treat each other according to each one’s human dignity by recognizing the real gravity of our choices.  It is necessary that we treat each other as subjects as well as objects of concern, and therefore that we require others to heed what is known about the consequences of each person’s actions.

When a man allows his objectifying gaze to linger on a woman, or another man, in a way that arouses a desire he does not wish to reason against–a condition that most of us have fallen prey to at one time or another–then such a person needs to be warned against his next action, both on account of the evil inherent in the previous one (taking a person as an object of consumption) and on account of the grave consequences of the next one.

And when those consequences are not apparent within that person’s life, it will be necessary to appeal to history, to cultural knowledge, even to direct revelation (which abounds) in order to make that clear.

For example, with regard to efforts to enforce recognition of fake marriages (attempted marriages among persons incapable of marriage) on all people, the information we need to show compassion without harming others has already been given to us, if we have ears to hear:

Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

Sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman. In marriage the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and pledge of spiritual communion. Marriage bonds between baptized persons are sanctified by the sacrament.

“Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death.”

(source: Catechism of the Catholic Church)

as well as

Faced with the fact of homosexual unions, civil authorities adopt different positions. At times they simply tolerate the phenomenon; at other times they advocate legal recognition of such unions, under the pretext of avoiding, with regard to certain rights, discrimination against persons who live with someone of the same sex. In other cases, they favour giving homosexual unions legal equivalence to marriage properly so-called, along with the legal possibility of adopting children.

Where the government’s policy is de facto tolerance and there is no explicit legal recognition of homosexual unions, it is necessary to distinguish carefully the various aspects of the problem. Moral conscience requires that, in every occasion, Christians give witness to the whole moral truth, which is contradicted both by approval of homosexual acts and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons. Therefore, discreet and prudent actions can be effective; these might involve: unmasking the way in which such tolerance might be exploited or used in the service of ideology; stating clearly the immoral nature of these unions; reminding the government of the need to contain the phenomenon within certain limits so as to safeguard public morality and, above all, to avoid exposing young people to erroneous ideas about sexuality and marriage that would deprive them of their necessary defences and contribute to the spread of the phenomenon. Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.

In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.

(source: Considerations Regarding Proposals…)

It is not possible to bypass this responsibility.  It is not possible to keep this responsibility from taking legal form, indefinitely.

And it is not permissible to allow the lawless language of antirealist legislation to replace our knowledge of the law.  It is harmful to those we seek to help, to ourselves and our neighbors; and it exposes us all to the lawless violence of the regime unhinged from reason.  Unhinged from reality.

Rather than this, we must necessarily choose resistance.

We must know what our victory looks like.

This reminds me of one of the footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s “Datum Centurio,” a short story in the form of an imaginary dictionary entry (for the word “date”) from the future: “Cf. Catholic dogma, perverse vindication of.”

(source: Surrogate mother pressured to abort triplets)

I have long been aware of the way that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction tends, whatever effort to the contrary folks tend to exert, to reinforce the stable understanding of humanity that has remained largely unchanged, fads and fictions in popular philosophy notwithstanding, as long as humans have had leisure to reflect on their nature.  It is no accident that Aristotle and Aquinas largely agree on what humans are, or that they agree with Augustine and Avicenna, or again with Anselm–and on and on, and A to Z of the epochal thinkers of human nature come down to certain basics.

Those who try to re-invent humanity invariably have to re-invent the same features of humanity with different names, under some preferred mode of control that “fixes” their preferred distortions in place.  These built-in features, whose relationship to our biological existence and spiritual significance I describe as “thinking in brains,” mean that we have definite capacities and limitations, definite possibilities of thought and existence and definite boundaries to what conceivable things we can realize.  We can often strike a pose, in our minds or in our most ephemeral fictions, that nobody could possibly hold while actively working and living in the complex web of relationships that define our actual existence, the creaturely being of humans.

And because we are often trying to hold a pose that is not well-fitted to our creaturely being, we find ourselves exposed to certain threats, certain horrors, that we must keep at bay in controllable fictions and in “morality plays” whose theme is our power to finally change humanity, to force all our neighbors into the mold that makes us happiest.  And these fictions, when they are compelling, spell out our fear of what we cannot actually redesign, our fear of what is too real for us to control leaks out in the nervous laughter that turns into farce whenever we try to “repeat an act” of horror.  Horror, it turns out, is “conservative” in its essential underpinnings:  It reflects human nature’s reality beneath the level of our social and technological manipulation, the reality that doesn’t go away when we tell civil lies about it.

This idea, both in my days as a radical occasionalist, voluntarist species of nominalist who believed that post-structuralism offered me the best textual strategy for radically relativizing all human authority to the divine Author’s written Word, and in my recovering sanity as a metaphysical realist who believes that only a concretely realized coordination of the Word written and the sacramental Real Presence of the Word Incarnate suffices to ground us in Creation and nourish us in the grace of Redemption, animates my interest in the way that culture changes, often without regard to our stated intentions, as we compete in our efforts to defend and institutionalize our preferred lies and popular errors.

And so I have been interested to watch the following exchange unfold.  First, Jeremy Neill with an article that I commented on casually when it came out, arguing that eventually the self-destructive forces of inhumane ideology must give way to a consensus on what humanity actually is, but doing so with some assumptions many of us will find ill-considered:

Karl Marx once asserted that life determines consciousness, and that consciousness does not determine life. He meant that underlying technologies and infrastructures produce corresponding worldviews, at a conscious level, in the minds of people. People might think that they are the ones who are forming their opinions. But, for Marx, the stories that people tell themselves about how they are directing their lives at a conscious level are just-so stories. In fact, people’s conscious opinions are being determined—inexorably and subconsciously—by the deep social infrastructure.

I am not a Marxist. But when it comes to the sexuality wars, I think Marx might have been on to something. It probably was, more than anything else, these mid-twentieth-century technology and infrastructure shifts—that “life” that determines consciousness—that produced the rapid and dramatic opinion shifts we have seen in the last decade.

We humans were the ones who created these changes in technology and infrastructure. But once created they took on a life of their own, with massive and unintended opinion-formation consequences.

(source: On Human Sexuality, Conservative Victory is Inevitable)

I agree that our development and use of various technological means to manage reproduction–and to truncate ourselves sexually, even to the point of surgically mutilating ourselves and slaughtering children–has far-reaching consequences.  I do not, however, think that it makes sense to treat ideology as an epiphenomenon of technology; I suspect Neill does this largely to sublimate the natural-law moral argument he might be making to a more “neutral” argument about political economy, and I actually agree that Marx is the right thinker to go to in such a gesture.  I disagree, however, that such a gesture is likely to be useful in any but an “Even Marx, who you might not expect me to cite, happens to agree with me here” manner.

Carl Trueman then weighed in with a gloomier, and I think more clear-eyed, perspective.  As one might expect from a historian in a confessional evangelical tradition, it mixes a strong thread of realism with a nominalist conclusion:

I agree with Neill that the sexual revolution is ultimately doomed, simply because it will be impossible to deny the given realities of human nature indefinitely with any degree of impunity. Transgenderism is both a specific example of this and emblematic of the whole. A man who believes he is a woman can have his body mutilated and pumped full of chemicals as much as he wants. Yet he remains only a mutilated, chemically distorted man, however much others might encourage him in his delusion. But it is also true that in his fight against reality, such a man has wreaked irreparable and irreversible damage on himself. Thus, in the grand scheme we cannot ultimately deny human nature; But we can do a whole of lot of damage in the attempt.

The fact that the sexual revolution is doomed does not mean that it will give way to older, more traditional patterns, however many alternative communities, Benedictine and otherwise, might continue to resist. Human beings are doing, and will continue to do, incalculable and quite possibly irreversible harm to themselves in their attempts at pretending to be their own little gods. And I believe that we are just insane enough to destroy ourselves rather than accept the obvious fact, that we are not free to be and do whatever we want.

(source: Not So Sanguine)

I basically agree with Trueman that Neill’s “silver lining” to what may be generations of grinding, self-destructive delusion on a colossal and legally-enforced scale is small consolation, and does not account for the possibilities of institutionalized evil and thoroughly pagan ideology and civic religion.  The United States of the Blaine Amendments, of evangelicals who “sowed the wind” of public schools designed to breed an Americanist religiosity (and suppress the Catholicism of “those foreigners”) and “reaped the whirlwind” of schools where prayer is banned (increasingly without regard for the caveats that many of us have long exploited), is no stranger to civic religion exalted against authentic Christianity.

Christendom always was a tenuous balance of forces, rarely thoroughly good; and the classical liberal consensus which emerged from Christendom has kept much of the best and the worst in a dynamic tension which has allowed some of each to flourish, and some of each to be forgotten, in fairly radical ways while granting historically unusual peace and prosperity in some corners of the world.  But civilizations have been built on paganism before, and I would be reverting to millennarianism if I were to assert as historically certain that the remains of Christendom would never be built over with a pagan civilization again.

(I would also be lying if I did not assert that even a hostile paganism might be preferable to a triumphant secularism!)

Yet Trueman seems to make two incompatible claims concerning the dominant reality in history:  the reality of human creatures as such, and the reality of human efforts to rationalize and institutionalize lies and errors.  If the former is the dominant reality, then Trueman should be able to provide more hope to those who struggle to systematically reinforce whatever contact with reality our culture will allow; if the latter is the dominant reality, then Trueman’s gloom is not only accurate, but renders his realist assertion meaningless.

And it is with these things in mind that I discover my friend and co-blogger Greg Forster’s effort to find another “way forward” that is neither so mercilessly happy nor so self-defeatingly tragic as these:

As for tradition, we cannot order our lives without it, but it too has never been sufficient for social order – particularly since the Reformation, which rendered all appeals to “tradition” permanently controversial. Religious freedom is flatly incompatible with treating tradition as a source of public authority. If tradition is the basis on which we resolve our public disputes, then disputes between traditions are irresolvable.

All this is to say that neither “conservatism” nor “tradition” is what we’re most interested in. What we really want is justice, mercy and love of neighbor. And those things can be built in ways that are not “conservative” or “traditional.” After the collapse of the sexual revolution, the world will have been remade. Carl is right that there will not be much hope for justice, mercy and love of neighbor if achieving those goals depends upon the reconstruction of an older, pre-sexual-revolution social world.

But why must that be the case? Wherever people are people, human beings made in the image of God, there is hope for justice, mercy and love of neighbor.

(source: Neither Sanguine Nor Resigned)

Now, I am happy to agree that if we define “conservatism” as strictly an American Republican “tapping the brakes on the railroad of Progress” phenomenon, and make no further effort to deal with a Burkean (or Hayekian) preservation of cultural institutions because of their embedded lore, or a Kirkian belief in durable wisdom, or a Catholic view of natural law as always essentially realized in certain human and social principles–that is, if we first assert Progress as the normative myth of our civic religion, and then offer “conservatism” only as a mechanism for adjusting it, then of course we will find it of little value.  For much this reason, I rarely bother to publicly identify as “conservative” or debate the nature of “true” conservatism, anymore (if I were to be a merely American ideologue, I would be a libertarian, anyway).

Likewise, if we take “tradition” to be the sort of thing that can be “rendered…permanently controversial,” then we have already foreclosed the discussion:  such a tradition lacks potential as a formative social reality.  If, however, we believe “tradition” has more senses than this–if there are human possibilities not subject to this deterministic schematization of history–then we would have to question Greg’s formulation.

And I think we do need to question Greg’s formulation, because he seems to be at once resisting historical determinism–Neill’s appeal to Marx, and Trueman’s narrative of ruin–and asserting it.  Not only is “tradition…permanently controversial,” but “after the collapse of the sexual revolution, the world will have been remade.”  Greg does not seem to be permitting “tradition” to operate unless it operates at the scale of global history, and according to a philosophy of history that imagines Progress as unfolding through successive revolutions.  Accordingly, Greg must locate the permanent features of humanity–which, being a Christian, he knows must exist–in areas which he hopes to conceive as untouched by “tradition” or “conservatism” and not “controversial” even in a “world…remade.”  He calls these, in a fitting reference to the prophets, “justice, mercy and love of neighbor.”

Now, in one sense, I am happy to agree that we can practice these things in some measure, no matter how totalitarian and secularist, or how pagan, the world becomes.  But “in some measure” is not a worthy or sufficient goal for public discourse and public action.  The more institutionalized evil is, the harder a culture works to enforce its distortions and silence those who speak truth about reality, the less likely it is that justice will actually be done in a way that can be seen to be such publicly, that mercy can actually be shown in effective and durable ways, that “love of neighbor” will show up as a shared life more often than a prudent silence about the neighbor’s conformity or nonconformity to the prevailing ideological imperatives.  If the Obama administration’s entire conduct had been a political cartoon designed to illustrate this truth, it could not have done so more aptly (short of directly re-enacting a dystopian fiction).

To do justice, one needs to know what sort of beings one is dealing with; one must believe that it matters that justice is seen to be done, and not that mere conditioning to deliberately silence reflection with consumerist excess is “justice” if it involves relatively few public acts of physical violence.  To have mercy, one must have a conception of “covenant” or solidarity that makes it possible to judge when reconciliation achieves the end of justice–to enable the practice of charity, rather than seizure of the other as an object of desire–better than enforcement of laws, better than a rigid insistence on individual autonomy and self-determination.  One must know when a contract is an unconscionable bargain, even if “freely” entered into, to have justice or show mercy; and that requires a frame of reference outside that of nominally free individuals voluntarily entering into agreements.  And one must have a sense of what a “neighbor” is–a human creature, like me–and how a human creature can actually be an object and subject of “love,” if one is to practice “love of neighbor.”

And how will anyone learn these things, without a teacher?  For there is plenty of law, especially in regimes built on anti-human ideology, that is not “justice”; plenty of happy-faced action, of pleasant bureaucratic intervention, that is in no sense “mercy”; plenty of niceness or amorous activity that is not “love” of someone whose humanity is too ignored or obscured to be considered a “neighbor.”  If there is no one to hand on–traditio–the understanding of humanity, and human society, that makes it possible to practice justice and mercy meaningfully, and no scope for their significant public exercise, then what could be the point of asserting the permanent possibility of “justice, mercy, and love of neighbor”?  And how could it be “love of neighbor” to fail to advocate for the neighbor’s self-understanding of himself as a proper subject and object of justice and mercy, a potential recipient and practitioner of the theological virtue of love?

And this is why I think it is useful to go back to the prophets:

He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

(source: Micah 6 RSVCE)

Not accidentally, nor at all unusually in the prophets, this passage immediately follows a reminder (one might call it “conservative” to reach back into the past, this way) of God’s historical work in shaping His People, a model of what happens when the powerful suborn convenient lies rather than truth.  And not accidentally, the “reproach” of the prophet, here, is taken up in the liturgy in the Impropreria, or Reproaches, of the Good Friday service.  The People of God are, after all, in the first instance those who learn that we must “walk humbly with [our] God” because we have abandoned Him, turned away from His justice and spurned His love, and even treated His mercy as an excuse rather than a costly forgiveness and an opportunity to reconciliation with His justice.  Only in our self-understanding as the forgiven and Beloved do we become, by the infusion of the theological virtue of charity, capable of “love of neighbor” in a durable sense; only then do we find ourselves participating in the suffering of Christ, who in His suffering turns to those who abandon Him and who scorn Him, crying,

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

(source: Matthew 23:37 RSVCE)

And so I contend that lament is justified, not least because the “perverse vindication” of truth happens–as Trueman points out–at a constant and damning price in human lives, human beings shattered, human souls lost to Hell without our best efforts to rescue them.

Joy comes in the morning, but weeping does endure for the night.  They do come in rejoicing with their sheaves, but they went forth with weeping.  However much the misguided press strategies common in my own tradition may seem to mandate a habit of grinning like a jackanapes, the simple truth is that Jesus Christ and his Apostles and the prophets before them knew joy as a present hope of a future reality that granted them a strong reason and desire to continue in their suffering service, not as a complacent cheer or constant projection of smiling unctuosity!

Rather, it is vital that we cultivate our resources for human self-understanding, shore up our institutions on whatever scale we are able, fight rear-guard actions in terms of the prevailing ideology wherever those actually do serve our institutions (without regard for foolish consistency), and never neglect to actually do good and to repudiate every kind of bigotry.

And it is for this reason that I think it is important to notice that, human nature being in fact invariant, efforts to distort it have predictable patterns and consequences.

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions–limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions.

(source: Humanae Vitae, emphasis added)

And, as I have pointed out before, this is in fact what we find.  Human nature does not actually change; we merely reflect its realities well or badly in our popular discourse and our laws.  And, having decided to do exactly what Humanae Vitae predicted, our society does so quite badly indeed.  We have radically subverted the meaning of marital consent, which is precisely the one kind of consent to a sexual bond that it is possible for humans to actually give, and so we are increasingly reliant on absurd and self-defeating simulacra of marriage to restrain every kind of rape, abuse, and false accusation about sexual behavior; our laws are radically subverted by the lies we tell ourselves; our capacity to educate, to form human beings in an intergenerational wisdom that exceeds their commercially useful impulses, is crippled; and in these conditions, does anyone expect “justice, mercy, and love of neighbor” to flourish in any meaningful degree?

No, we can expect to see confusion flourish, at best.  And conflict, more likely.  And that means that we will have to decide to live as a Resistance, or we will actually be forced to redefine ourselves endlessly to pretend we are “conservative,” or to resign ourselves to irrelevance if we accept that “traditional” is now “rendered…permanently controversial.”

But this is not defeatism.  It is what happens when, despite our deep, even almost desperate, grief and sadness–and frustration in our love, and fury at the harm human creatures do to each other in the name of being uncreated–we know that we are triumphant.

Because we have always known what our victory looked like.

In light of recent events, I keep reverting to something I said months ago, referencing a strong conviction that has been growing stronger since my days in Europe as the graduate assistant for Baylor’s Study Abroad program in Maastricht–a thought that took concrete form when that group of mostly pre-med students toured the medical history museum at the Charite in Berlin, where the likes of Virchow worked:  

More empirical facts are better than fewer, but they are not a good apart from and incommensurable with other goods, such as the respect for the integrity of human bodies that should have prevented a science from founding itself on stolen corpses and bodies in Bell jars.

(source: Et Seq. | Hang Together)

It is no accident that opposition to the authoritative revelation of the creaturely nature of humans and anti-human views of science are routinely found together:

As Matyssek makes clear, Virchow’s interest in promoting science among the lay public stemmed in large part from his well-known support for the Kulturkampf. Although the museum itself was founded after the Kulturkampf, Virchow himself adhered to his suspicion of “ultramontanism.” While Virchow and others regarded the Kulturkampf as a struggle for science and “Kultur” (what we would today call civilization) against the influence of Catholicism in public life, the struggle was neither religiously nor ethnically neutral. Indeed, the Kulturkampf was often explicitly anti-Polish and, as Michael Gross has shown, liberal Jews also worried about an easy slide from anti-Catholicism to anti-Semitism.[1] While Virchow himself described the Kulturkampf in the language of science versus religion, it was, in fact, as much about enforcing religious conformism as about secularization.

(source: H-Net Reviews)

It is vital that you understand that there are entire classes of people, at all strata from the wage-slave to the well-funded, from the beaten-down lab tech to the people who run the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation and their cronies, who have for generations been trained to view humans like this:

…and when they awaken, they haltingly admit what has troubled their dreams, like this:

It is up to us to witness the evil, and to bear witness to the truth about Creator and creature; to listen, and to speak, and to act.

Let us find a way to act, decisively, now. (Here’s a start.)

The Catholic Diocese of Tulsa has resigned from membership in the Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice because of the organization’s involvement in last Saturday’s Tulsa Pride parade, according to a letter from the Rev. Msgr. Patrick Gaalaas to OCCJ President and Chief Executive Officer Jayme Cox and Board of Directors Chairman Russ Florence.
…
“The executive committee’s decision to join officially in Saturday’s ‘Tulsa Pride’ parade, inviting board members to celebrate the event by marching behind the OCCJ banner, was, we are fairly certain, not made without careful thought,” Gaalaas wrote. “To march in such a parade seems to us to be a deliberate and full-throttled expression of support for the so-called gay agenda, a central component of which is same-sex marriage. Unless a clear statement can be made by OCCJ that its participation does not imply support for same-sex marriage or be seen to condone sexual acts outside of marriage, we have no option but to withdraw from membership.”

(source: Tulsa Catholic diocese drops out of OCCJ over Pride parade participation)

It is important to realize that these decisions are being made for reasons.  If we do not want to anticipate the moment, or overreact, neither do we want to wait until “it’s too late now” or “how can you object to this, when you didn’t object to that” become the arguments that envervate, emasculate, and sterilize our participation in reality–as they have so many times in the past, and in recent years.  It is never less than about “witness,” though it is almost always more than that.

Protestant friends have been seeing the same thing happen.  A not-particularly-orthodox figure in American evangelicalism, predictably in line with “progressive” groupthink, suddenly announces as a change what his organization had quietly supported for years.  Christianity Today, the flagship publication of the Billy Graham segment of American evangelicalism, had the gumption to respond appropriately:

The unity and depth of Christian teaching on marriage may not be news. Neither are the hundreds of thousands of planes that land safely each day. It’s not novel. It’s not surprising or counterintuitive. But it is reality—and a reality that is not going away anytime soon. Any time at all, for that matter, because it is grounded in the deepest realities.

We at CT are sorry when fellow evangelicals modify their views to accord with the current secular thinking on this matter. And we’ll continue to be sorry, because over the next many years, there will be other evangelicals who similarly reverse themselves on sexual ethics.

We’ll be sad, but we won’t panic or despair. Neither will we feel compelled to condemn the converts and distance ourselves from them. But to be sure, they will be enlisting in a cause that we believe is ultimately destructive to society, to the church, and to relations between men and women.

So yes, another couple of prominent evangelicals have come out in support of gay sexual ethics. It’s disappointing, but no reason to react defensively or angrily. We plan to treat with charity and respect those with whom we disagree, while we continue to call for a sexual ethic that, by God’s design, is one of the key ways to foster human flourishing.

(source: Breaking News: 2 Billion Christians Believe in Traditional Marriage)

And I agree that there is no reason to “feel compelled to condemn,” and indeed that even the “distance” we may not be able to avoid is a “distance” created when others push off against us or insist on our approval, coerced if necessary, for what we cannot possibly call good without being condemned in what we approve.   But I do also understand why conservative Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler felt the need to point out the uncomfortable possibilities latent in such nuance:

Those statements, drawn from the editorial, are clear, convictional, and timely. Galli put Christianity Today on the record as opposed to same-sex marriage and to the affirmation of same-sex relationships in the church.
…
I have to admit that I do not understand how those two sentences can be combined. If the view of the “converts” to same-sex marriage and the acceptance of homosexual partnerships is “ultimately destructive to society, to the church, and to relations between men and women,” how can that distance be avoided?

The reality is that it cannot. This is a moment of decision, and every evangelical believer, congregation, denomination, and institution will have to answer. There will be no place to hide.

(source: Which Way, Evangelicals? There is Nowhere to Hide)

The time of decision is, indeed, upon us.  Has been, in fact, for longer than most people think.

You cannot serve two masters.

I agree in principle that “we can share this country” is the better part of “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”  Just the same, saying this with our hands in the air to those who regard our “share” as a strictly notional, de-institutionalized, publicly inconsequential “freedom of worship” is–well, it’s like making a statement at a sentencing hearing, like pleading with the firing squad.  To “share” will have to mean something that actually permits us to institutionalize our principles, in some real and publicly consequential times and places.

(source: How To Do This?)

Greg sensibly replies thus:

Acting as useful idiots for the church’s enemies…that’s not the path I’m advocating. That’s not “we can share this country” but “please kill us last.” It feeds the persecution of the church just as much as culture-warriorism. The solution is to be neither. Admittedly, models for that are few, though not nonexistent. But I don’t see any alternative to trying. We don’t know whether we can bulid moral consensus. We do know that culture-warriorism is a cure worse than the disease.

(source: How To Do This?)

I reply by pressing him to “draw me a picture” of the alternative, because as far as I can see it exists only in the cracks, right now–or where massive legal and even constitutional change alter the total situation:  

It’s important to me to try to get this down to cases, because whether I approach it from a pragmatist, a Lockean, or a Thomistic point of view, I cannot coherently decide what means to employ without concrete expectations about the end–to be evaluated based on desireability, achievability, etc.

I agree that being aggressors in “culture war” is folly. I also believe that only one party is necessary to make war; two are only necessary if there is to be any doubt about the outcome.

(source: How To Do This?)

This last point is one I have made before, at considerable length:

You don’t have to be eager for conflict to find that you are in one.  It is folly to believe that all wars are optional, that all deployments of violent rhetoric and forceful means are to be met with anxious soul-searching rather than honest refusal to cave in and kowtow to the mob’s anointed.
…
It is always unwise to ignore how much our culture owes to the totalitarianism envisioned by Bismarck and his enablers, the likes of Virchow.  Kulturkampf was originally a specific phase of German politics, but it was always a deliberate “war of choice,” an intentional violence of the regime against the Church and her faithful.
…
That influence…lasted well beyond the fierce 1871-1878 hostility.  It remained a prominent feature of the Third Reich, as well, and set the background for the Vatican’s protracted negotiations over the rights of clergy and the faithful with Bismarck’s totalitarian heirs, Hitler and the Nazis.  And it influenced the relations of Christians to Stalinist regimes, as well as the American debate over the Progressive economic and eugenic policies such as abortion, forced sterilization, mandatory universal public education in government schools, secularization of the public square, nationalization of “commanding heights” industries by corporate/regulatory conglomerates, and nationalization of higher education.  American politics were deeply corrupted by the adulation of these policies cribbed or adapted from Bismarck’s Prussia common to our anti-Semitic, upper-class, white, liberal, coastal elite political and cultural minorities

(source: Kulturkampf is just what it says)

And it is with that in view that I point out a couple of “bottom line” considerations that we sometimes forget in our efforts to come up with an acceptable modus vivendi in our present circumstances:

In any case, I could not agree that a rhetoric of conciliation is the only right way to deal with fundamental moral conflict. As long as Christ is still coming with a sword proceeding from His mouth, as long as among His promises to His saints is rule, it cannot be *in principle* wrong–though it may well be *imprudent* at almost all times and places–for there to be secular power in service of the eternally True, Good, and Beautiful. In fact, there is no non-tyrannical reason for a government to require obedience other than its subservience to just such a divine order. And there cannot possibly be any fundamental human right to commit a mortal sin; it is impossible that the secular arm’s forcibly forbidding such should, in itself, ever violate a real human right. Even if doing so *under certain circumstances* might be wrong, it cannot be *in itself* wrong to do so.

And that is why, in the case where it *would* be wrong or imprudent to appeal to the secular arm to do so–which I think it would be, in our case–I still have no problem urging people to “be wise as serpents, harmless as doves” about their involvements in the world. It is quite prudent to remind regimes that Christians obey government precisely “for the Lord’s sake,” a principle which limits that obedience as profoundly as it commands it (hence most of Christendom’s strong rejection of Caesaropapism).  We–as Church and as families, and in our neighborhoods first–ought to be living in a way that embodies the good definitively enough that it can provoke embrace or martyrdom from the regime, and if toleration is the via media, that’s totally acceptable.

And when we do that, we must definitely also find that we have principled reasons as Christians to advocate a charitable and hospitable Toleration as a policy (and that doing so in no way requires us to pre-emptively surrender to the violent and nihilistic who aim to destroy that charity and hospitality).

(source: How To Do This?)

So:  how do we do this?

In early 2015, our Archdiocese like many others was offered a 47-question open-ended survey in order to gather information about what people throughout the world understand about the Church’s teaching, her pastoral practice, current conditions, and the reality of marriage and family life.  The survey was probably a poor translation, and the questions were ill-structured, so I ended up writing about 15,500 words in the one week window for completing it.  I have chosen to share a few of these, here, as well, for your comments.  I will quote the question, and what follows is my answer.  I have edited the answers slightly for brevity, politeness, and clarity.

5. How does the Church respond, in her pastoral activity, to the diffusion of cultural relativism in secularized society and to the consequent rejection, on the part of many, of the model of family formed by a man and woman united in the marriage and open to life?

“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: PREACH THE WORD, BE URGENT IN SEASON AND OUT OF SEASON, CONVINCE, REBUKE, AND EXHORT, BE UNFAILING IN PATIENCE AND IN TEACHING. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry” —What else IS there? Woe unto me if I preach not the Gospel!

But the work of proclamation must suffuse the lives of the faithful and shape their interaction in family, parish, and neighborhood. To do that, we must recognize that the faithful have different gracious abilities, obligations, and understandings than are current in the world at large. When we assess the behavior of the faithful by the standards of the world at large, we invariably suffer the “ideological colonization” of which the Holy Father has so forthrightly spoken. Rather, we must teach the faithful to understand themselves as they are in reality, not as they are construed in the faulty categories of Enlightenment rationalism, Modernism, and post-modern thought. Those who teach the faithful must be conversant in the language of essences, able to differentiate formal principles from subsequent social constructions. They must be able to reason in terms of analogy, rather than constantly wavering between univocal propositions and emotivist mystification. They must be able to interpret Scripture with fidelity to the historical sense unfettered by outmoded skeptical and higher critical presuppositions, but in expectation of a robust spiritual sense that escapes the reductionism of merely historical-critical or historical-grammatical exegesis. They must be able to understand “spiritual” as referring to the manifestation of divinely revealed realities, of manifest relationships between God and other people that might remain obscure to unaided natural reason, and to understand that as having the dimensions that the Church has long held Scripture to unfold: the sense relating to the manifestation of the People of God as those called to realize their union with Christ, their Head and Bridegroom; the sense relating to the individual need to be truly conformed to Christ, to live at the level of His calling; and the sense relating to the incipient fulfillment of all that faith proclaims and hope expects in Christ.

Only when the formation of teachers within the Church, and the formation of the faithful, actually conforms to sound exegetical principles and orthodox hermeneutical and catechetical methods will the faithful be able to see the reality of husband+wife and parent+child in their proper light, the light the Church has always proclaimed and that the Magisterium has continually reaffirmed. Only when the faithful can understand themselves as they really are will they be able to reason with the rest of the world on reasonable terms of committed dialogue (admitting that we come to the table with presuppositions, not as empty notepads) and appeal to common ground (expecting that observation of empirical and sociological evidence will eventually reveal both what is real and how it is distorted by subsequent social construction). And only when the faithful can understand themselves as they really are will they be able to commit themselves to truth, goodness, and beauty as united in Christ all the way to martyrdom without running ahead to foolish political extravagances and futile gestures of defiance or conciliation.

Instead, returning to my interpretation of “how does” as “what have I seen … doing,” I would say that in general I see a shoulder-shrugging fatalism about “secularized society” taken as a starting point for analysis, built on a series of mistakes that lead to “ideological colonization”: the confusion of sociological with empirical method, and thus the conflation of a wide variety of social constructions with “science” as though sociological observations of current habits were material and historical facts or features of Creation; a resulting tendency to treat only the invisible matters of faith, and at that only the interior ones, whether of individual motivation or social sentiment, as the proper domain of the spiritual and of authoritative teaching. Compounding this, the Church appears more afraid of being labeled “fundamentalist” by those hostile to all consequential religious teaching than of being considered unfaithful by Christ.

For all of that, there are many signs of hope! American Catholics seem to have been surprised awake by the Obama administration’s bafflingly unprovoked and consistent efforts to re-enact Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, marginalizing Christians generally and Catholics very specifically across the board. The response has been far too merely political, and rationalized using Enlightenment ideology that cannot actually suffice—that is, in fact, a contributor to the very “ideological colonization” which it should be our first priority to resist. There are efforts to teach, there are many of the faithful who are vocally refusing to be confused or bewildered by the uncertain sound of many dithering bishops in Europe, and there are many who are energized to “cast into the deep” in pursuit of greater holiness. There is a general, effectual resistance to the American regime’s support for abortion on demand, and a broad consensus that the slaughter of babies recognizeably moving, resisting pain, and learning language should be illegal—resisted only by certain hard-liners and the sclerotic politics of a decadent nation. If we are willing to teach our own the truth, and to commit ourselves to martyrdom on its behalf, there is every reason to think that God may yet send us days of joy and triumph.

Robert George has a trenchant call for the unity of reasonable people in the face of the torch-and-pitchfork crowd’s endless and irrational animus:

The lynch mob came for the brilliant mild-mannered techie Brendan Eich.
The lynch mob came for the elderly florist Barronelle Stutzman.
The lynch mob came for Eastern Michigan University counseling student Julea Ward.
The lynch mob came for the African-American Fire Chief of once segregated Atlanta Kelvin Cochran.
The lynch mob came for the owners of a local pizza shop the O’Connor family.
[…]
[W]ho if anyone will courageously stand up to the mob? Who will resist? Who will speak truth to its raw and frightening power? Who will refuse to be bullied into submission or intimidated into silence?

(source: Who Will Stand? | Robert P. George | First Things — links added, PGE)

Of course, George knows that shouting futilely at the darkness is not half as effective as shaming the mob.  Nonetheless, it is important to remember that one of the basic features of mob action, of hateful incitement, is the disinhibiting effect–the intoxication–of being one of the crowd, of yielding to passions without restraint or consideration.  This is most intense among mindless people caught up in a stampede of violence, but it is easier when the disinhibiting effect of pleasing the herd is multiplied by the disinhibiting effect of pseudo-anonymous online interaction.

It is also important to understand that nothing about the way the torch-and-pitchfork crowd operates—at every level–suggests any limiting principle to their lawlessness; its only consistent principle is opportunistic nihilism.  As George says:  

Oh yes, the mob came first for the Evangelicals and the Catholics and the Latter-Day Saints; but do not be deceived: it will not stop with them. It’s true that many in the mob have a particular animus against Christians, but the point of destroying the reputations and livelihoods of the initial victims is pour encourager les autres. If you believe you belong to a group that will be given a special exemption or dispensation from the enforcement of the new orthodoxy—by any means necessary—you will soon learn that you are tragically mistaken. No one who dissents will be given a pass.

We have seen how swiftly the demands have moved from tolerance to compulsory approbation of behavior historically rejected as contrary to morality and faith by virtually all the great religious traditions of the world. And now it is not only approbation that is demanded, but active participation. And do you honestly think that we have now reached the endpoint of what will be demanded?

(source: Who Will Stand? | Robert P. George | First Things)

Now and then–now, as then–it falls to each of us to stare down our own worst instincts, to put a moment of reason between our situation and our reaction, to be correctible in conscience rather than subject to destructive passions in our mob-made “self-expression” whose intoxicating “liberation” binds us ever deeper in our slavery.

Slavery to ourselves; slavery to our milieu; slavery to the idols of the tribe; slavery to our masters, our manipulators, our devices, even our own most contemptible trolls.

As an educator in the liberal arts, it is my life’s work to compel students to face this need:  the need for reasonable people to work hard to be in touch with reality, not to be driven about by inattention, ill-considered habit, and passionate fancy.  It is why I write poetry; it is why I teach rhetoric.

God help us, perhaps some day it may be enough.  God help us.

Sometimes Prudentia must speak more firmly, just to be considered.

Does not wisdom call, does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights beside the way,
in the paths she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:

To you, O men, I call,
and my cry is to the sons of men.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
O foolish men, pay attention.

(source: Proverbs 8 RSVCE – The Gifts of Wisdom – Does not wisdom – Bible Gateway)

So Rod Dreher:

Today’s Indianapolis Star front page uses the headline approach usually reserved for war. Because that’s what this is: culture war, and the mainstream media, as a vital part of the progressive movement, is waging total war for a cause they believe is holy. I’m not exaggerating. To most of the media, there is no other side in the gay marriage debate, or on anything to do with gay rights. There is only Good and Evil. And so we have the spectacle of a moral panic that makes a party that is a chief beneficiary of the First Amendment — a newspaper — taking unprecedented steps to suppress a party that is the other chief beneficiary of the First Amendment: religious dissenters. In my experience, it is impossible to overstate how sacred this cause is to American elites, especially journalists.

If you thought this was ever about fairness, justice, tolerance, or reason, you now ought to have had your eyes opened.

(source: Indiana: The Holy War of the Left | The American Conservative)

It is always unwise to ignore how much our culture owes to the totalitarianism envisioned by Bismarck and his enablers, the likes of Virchow.  Kulturkampf was originally a specific phase of German politics, but it was always a deliberate “war of choice,” an intentional violence of the regime against the Church and her faithful.

(source: rbb Prussia Chronicle | Image: The end of the Kulturkampf)

It is easy to get “separation of Church and State” if you really want it: 

The Pulpit Law of 1871 (which was technically in force until 1953 in Germany) forbade priests from discussing state affairs from the pulpit and sentenced priests who violated the law to at least two years imprisonment. Passage of this law meant that priests could not even preach about the dangers of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf from the pulpit.

(source: German Culture Wars)

That influence, as you can see, lasted well beyond the fierce 1871-1878 hostility.  It remained a prominent feature of the Third Reich, as well, and set the background for the Vatican’s protracted negotiations over the rights of clergy and the faithful with Bismarck’s totalitarian heirs, Hitler and the Nazis.  And it influenced the relations of Christians to Stalinist regimes, as well as the American debate over the Progressive economic and eugenic policies such as abortion, forced sterilization, mandatory universal public education in government schools, secularization of the public square, nationalization of “commanding heights” industries by corporate/regulatory conglomerates, and nationalization of higher education.  American politics were deeply corrupted by the adulation of these policies cribbed or adapted from Bismarck’s Prussia common to our anti-Semitic, upper-class, white, liberal, coastal elite political and cultural minorities:

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

(source: MichaelCrichton.com | This Essay Breaks the Law)

And so it is with these things in mind that some of us bristle at the insanity of shrill, denunciatory mobs in service of this ideology–already demonstrably bankrupt as an intellectual tradition and a viable foundation for a regime–attempting to define as aggressors in “Culture War” those who seek, on the one hand, to protect the legitimate claims of local societies against their usurpation by totalizing ideology and, on the other hand, to maintain a consequential grasp on moral and spiritual realities which we can only deny to our very great hurt.

I never was a fan of Jerry Falwell, and I wrote myself out of the “Religious Right” back when well-read bachelors still knew who Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson were.

But if the model of “toleration” in this culture is the model set out by the Bismarck who implemented Virchow’s radical purge against all public Christianity, then it is Kulturkampf–warfare by state control of cultural institutions–no matter how we may attempt to paint it.  And it needs to be denounced as such.

The RFRA in Indiana is a good law in itself. But that’s now beside the point, because the campaign against it has made it into a proxy battle over a wide range of issues. The well-orchestrated attack is heavy on denunciation. Tim Cook says the Indiana law is a “license to discriminate,” which means those of us who support it favor exactly that. We’re paving the way for bigotry! The implication is that we’re unfit to be citizens of the United States.

The same goes for Governor Cuomo and Governor Malloy’s announcements banning “non-essential travel” to Indiana. An official state boycott? That’s unprecedented. What could justify such an action other than the judgment that something of unprecedented wickedness has occurred?

No, actually, state actions against other states is not unprecedented. It happened in 1860 and is called the Civil War. This is not an encouraging precedent. And it is hardly a gentle, inclusive message to those of us who think the Indiana law is a good idea.

(source: Indiana, Religious Freedom, and the Hysteria | R. R. Reno | First Things)

This is trademark Progressive ideological posturing, to be sure:

We’ve seen it over and over.

…but it is not how reasonable people settle disputed matters.

It is how ideology chews the living heart out of the very body that hosts it.

It is an ongoing warfare, even if for now it is warfare continued by other means.

But why should this be surprising?

This was always what our victory looked like.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.

(source: Matthew 28 RSVCE)

and could really have used the sleep,

and some dinner.

Hmmmm…..

In the sections of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that are dedicated to empirical science, Locke shows at length how the whole scholastic method of philosophy is intrinsically hostile to empirical science. He was no fool; he knew at whose works he was really aiming. And while I, like you, have made the journey from nominalism to realism, I think we can have realism without the scholastic method of philosophy, and if we value empirical science we must do so.

In short, you seem to think the only really important fight is between Aquinas and Augustine, who occupies the more militantly anti-rationalist space on Aquinas’ metaphysical “Right,” to use a political metaphor. But there is also space on Aquinas’ metaphysical “Left,” and the question between you and I is whether the golden mean lies where Aquinas is, or further to his Left.

(source: Et Seq. | Hang Together)

I’m just struggling to understand your stake in all of this, Greg.  I do understand that Locke had to make choices in a pretty highly charged environment, and we both have friends who have to do the same, but I really don’t see how that figures into a general understanding of their place in the history of ideas.

More to the point, I’m not sure why we’re discussing this when the salient fact remains that there is no significant difference between “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act” and “Kicking Unborn Child Act” to discuss; it makes no difference what level of medical knowledge you have, if you are committed to ignoring it to save a false principle.

From my perspective, Augustine and Aquinas are high points in an unfolding of Christian understanding of all things; Augustine’s work was perhaps the most developed expression of the relationship of divine revelation to all human knowing available, and the most tightly integrated with the period from Christ through the great Councils recognized by all Christians, and the most capable in using secular/pagan categories of understanding and rhetoric to relate revelation to all areas of thought and life.

There is a vulnerability in the tradition after Augustine, as there always is after a seminal thinker achieves a durable synthesis:  reduction to a flawed, less-than-the-reality-discussed, syllabus of rote points.  In the case of Augustine, the achievement and limitations of Boethius in transmitting the Platonic elements of the tradition combined with Augustine’s own Platonic antecedents and stylistic preferences.  (We also have to include the popularity of Dionysius the Aeropagite [pseudo-Dionysius] and the constant inroads of Gnostic/Manichaean/Paulician/Bogomil/Cathar heresy, as well.)  The difficulty in tying the Platonic tradition down–of recapturing the synthesis that seemed possible when reading Augustine–was the lack of articulation with reality.  As a result, unbalanced secularization or spiritualization threatened the effort to articulate divine truth with human lived experience in every area of life–politics, medicine, cosmology, sanctification, agriculture, etc.

What Aquinas achieved, I am convinced, was to recover Augustine from that reduction–to defend against that vulnerability to dualistic misinterpretation–by judicious application of Aristotle.  Aristotle had improved on Plato precisely by better articulating the junctures of world/mind, matter/form, real/ideal; he made it “philosophical” to build up an understanding of real things from observations of their properties.

Aquinas was not a scientist, himself, nor primarily concerned with such knowledge.  Nobody would claim that he was.  Albert the Great, his mentor, was profoundly interested in such knowledge, and defends empirical study, but spent his career bringing all the knowledge already recorded in Aristotle forward to a Western Europe that had been groping about for some sufficiently rich understanding of the world.

I see no reason to conclude that Aquinas believed himself to have advanced a best or final method of primary research, either.  He proposed his greatest synthesis, the Summa, as a guide for the education of those who were being sent to preach down heresy and bring Christian teaching out of confusion.  In it, he clearly makes room for significant bodies of learning which, though not so finally significant as theology, were nonetheless each possessed of their own integral principles, and not to be merely vandalized by ill-considered proofs.

What Aquinas did, though, was to set out the synthesis that preserved and enlarged the Augustinian synthesis, and in so doing he bequeathed Western thought a functioning framework for using human reason (including observation) as an efficient tool of understanding without disconnecting it from revelation in a way that makes revealed truth become private/irrelevant, anti-realistically “higher,” or subject to endless deferral of meaning.  To the extent that empirical method is a means of achieving that end, I can see no evidence that Aquinas would oppose it.  More to the point, even if by his own personal and political circumstances he would be goaded into suspicion by this or that, I can look at the Summa and say that he definitely should not oppose it.

Put differently:  would you prefer the spirituality of Joachim of Fiore or the early judgments of Stephen Tempier had carried the day, or Aquinas?  Because until Aquinas successfully defended the mendicants and an orthodox application of Aristotle, those were the live options.  Christian understanding of truth hangs by slender threads over and over in church history.  And after that defense, you have Siger arguing “double truth” from Averroes, and sending us all the way to the extremes of the upper/lower story division; and this is all in the lifetime of Aquinas.

Now, to the extent that subsequent empirical method was able to refine our understanding because we could understand that knowledge of things and knowledge of words together integrated with reasoning in general and moved toward the end while revelation assists, crowns, and hastens us toward that same end, it is doing something that Aquinas labored to define and defend.  And to the extent that subsequent empirical method takes short-cuts by dismissing metaphysical and moral consequences out of hand, it damns souls while sometimes healing bodies.  I don’t know that we have yet figured out how to draw that line, but I know that we do have to draw it–and Aquinas will help (and Locke may, too).

“If thine eye offend thee…”

I think Locke wanted much that Aquinas wanted, insofar as concord is concerned; and I think that Locke did a remarkable job of excavating many of the same insights from beneath several centuries of decadent theorizing and political turmoil.  I think that it is profoundly regrettable that metaphysics had decayed so badly from Aquinas to Locke that Locke has to dig himself out from under so much rationalism to one side, Platonism to the other, with materialism poised to swoop.  I think it’s unfortunate that Locke’s method (which you lay out in your book) is so vulnerable to abuse by the likes of Hume, and that we can heal that by reaffirming that things–focal among them the body of the Incarnate Son–are the proper objects of the understanding, even though “for the intellect to understand actually its proper object, it must of necessity turn to the phantasms [IDEAS] in order to perceive the universal nature existing in the individual. But if the proper object of our intellect were a separate form; or if, as the Platonists say, the natures of sensible things subsisted apart from the individual; there would be no need for the intellect to turn to the phantasms whenever it understands.”  (What do you think of Ashworth on this articulation?  I’m scrambling to fill in my Locke gaps, and wish I had time to annotate the Essay with Aquinas parallels.)

But I think I can be more specific, still.  Take this passage from the Essay about “essence” for an example, edited and with emphasis added:

Secondly, the learning and disputes of the schools having been much busied about genus and species, the word essence has almost lost its primary signification: and instead of the real constitution of things, has been almost wholly applied to the artificial constitution of genus and species. It is true, there is ordinarily supposed a real constitution of the sorts of things; and it is past doubt, there must be some real constitution, on which any collection of simple ideas co-existing must depend. But it being evident, that things are ranked under names into sorts or species, only as they agree to certain abstract ideas, to which we have annexed those names: the essence of each genus, or sort, comes to be nothing but that abstract idea, which the general, or sortal (if I may have leave so to call it from sort, as I do general from genus) name stands for. And this we shall find to be that which the word essence imports in its most familiar use. These two sorts of essences, I suppose, may not unfitly be termed, the one the real, the other nominal essence.

[…]

§ 17. Concerning the real essences of corporeal substances, (to mention these only) there are, if I mistake not, two opinions. The one is of those, who using the word essence for they know not what, suppose a certain number of those essences, according to which all natural things are made, and wherein they do exactly every one of them partake, and so become of this or that species. [i.e., Platonists] The other, and more rational opinion, is of those who look on all natural things to have a real, but unknown constitution of their insensible parts; from which flow those sensible qualities, which serve us to distinguish them one from another, according as we have occasion to rank them into sorts under common denominations.

(source: The Works of John Locke, vol. 1 (An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 1) – Online Library of Liberty)

I would argue that here Locke tacks directly back toward Aquinas from his contemporaries and the High Scholastics.  Assuming that we do not take “essence” to mean “recipe,” we either mean “whatever is most precisely named by this name” or “whatever this thing named is in the most final analysis.”  The latter is the sense in which Aquinas uses “essence,” the sense seriously muddled by the later Scholastics (many of whom were his opponents, and wrote rival commentaries on Aristotle as the means of their opposition, among whom some like Scotus were more widely used down to Locke’s time).

For Aquinas, form inheres in matter (see this extended discussion from one of his lesser works, as always noting the objection/sed contra/respondeo form), so that “this man” is the indicated matter correctly identified as having (male) human form, where “what makes a man a man” is the form of a man [whatever that turns out to be upon inquiry], and “what makes this thing this thing” is the matter of this [supposed] man, and “what makes this man this man” is the essence of this man (always assuming this man exists).  Now, what we know is “this man,” but from knowledge of many men we may build up a mental picture of “what makes a man a man,” or we may be given authoritative information or divine revelation about “what makes a man a man,” such that we may (should) conclude that for every man “what makes this man this man” is some actuality in which they all participate; if God created every human being “in His image” and willed to make them “partakers of the divine nature,” and if Christ “is before all things, and in him all things hold together,” then it is hardly surprising to think that there is more to the Creator’s final determination of “what makes this man this man” than the sensible properties of matter and form in the individual.  (And it is just this analysis that goes haywire after Scotus.)

Empirical inquiry looks at the matter (or at least sifts the sensuous manifold) in individuals whose appearance suggests commonalities of form, and undertakes to unfold formal principles from that examination.  Unless matter has formal principles such that various “this thing” clusters of matter can yield them to human minds on such examination, and unless some formal principles prove useful in some analysis more final than “this thing,” there is no significance or direction or scope for this activity.  Bacon and Locke are champions of this method of inquiry; Aquinas, even more than Locke, is the champion of the significance of their work, able to offer perduring suggestions for its direction and scope.

Locke may be understandably impatient with his Schoolmen, and I cannot prove but that he may have had historical and political reasons as well as personal ones for treating all thought from Boethius to the Cambridge Platonists as all of a piece, but on the plane of ideas he is certainly not squaring off against Aquinas in any sense that would not undermine the basic principles of the Essay itself.  Locke’s objection to his Schoolmen, here, is that to order our knowledge of things by their “unknown constitution” is malarky, and the argument seems well taken when we consider only the objects of empirical experience:

But were there no other reason against it, yet the supposition of essences that cannot be known, and the making of them nevertheless to be that which distinguishes the species of things, is so wholly useless, and unserviceable to any part of our knowledge, that that alone were sufficient to make us lay it by, and content ourselves with such essences of the sorts or species of things as come within the reach of our knowledge: which, when seriously considered, will be found, as I have said, to be nothing else but those abstract complex ideas, to which we have annexed distinct general names.

(source: The Works of John Locke, vol. 1 (An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 1) – Online Library of Liberty)

[[ N.B. Beside the present point, I also object to this passage directly:  if we accept the equivocation of “known” that turns this into a categorical dismissal, then it presupposes against authentic revelation, which could quite definitely tell us that “what makes this man this man” is, in the Creator’s final analysis or even in an analysis much more final than we are now capable of, something more than we suppose, or could correct our present understanding in ways we could later understand more fully than we have yet known–a thing which must have happened many times, or we are still very seriously confused about that “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” we thought had unfolded Himself “at sundry times and in divers manners.” ]]

Now, of course, Locke here adopts the nominalist posture, but the suppleness of his understanding is still in evidence:  he has, so to speak, smuggled a functional replica of knowledge of essences in by the back door!  Locke’s “abstract complex ideas” are themselves easily resituated in the Summa, so tidily that I have longed to make a passage-by-passage comparison of the structures Aquinas and Locke build around human knowing.  Quoth Aquinas:

Our intellect cannot know the singular in material things directly and primarily. The reason of this is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter, whereas our intellect, as have said above (Q[85], A[1]), understands by abstracting the intelligible species from such matter. Now what is abstracted from individual matter is the universal. Hence our intellect knows directly the universal only. But indirectly, and as it were by a kind of reflection, it can know the singular, because, as we have said above (Q[85], A[7]), even after abstracting the intelligible species, the intellect, in order to understand, needs to turn to the phantasms in which it understands the species, as is said De Anima iii, 7. Therefore it understands the universal directly through the intelligible species, and indirectly the singular represented by the phantasm.  And thus it forms the proposition “Socrates is a man.”

(source: Summa Theologica – Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

Thus the same colour being observed to-day in chalk or snow, which the mind yesterday received from milk, it considers that appearance alone, makes it a representative of all of that kind; and having given it the name whiteness, it by that sound signifies the same quality, wheresoever to be imagined or met with: and thus universals, whether ideas or terms, are made.

(source: The Works of John Locke, vol. 1 (An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 1) – Online Library of Liberty)

Note that Locke’s method involves no less artificiality, no less imputation of teleological agency, in Locke’s “makes it … having given it,” and that in the Essay Locke consistently involves naming and arguments from the social utility of language in his explanation of the operations of the mind.  Precisely because his goal is realistic and humane, and I think also because he has a theistic formation, Locke’s most productive explanations (as opposed to his most intense protestations) all seem to swerve nominalist reasoning back toward Aquinas from Descartes or the Platonists.  For Aquinas, though, this mediate knowledge is still knowledge of that thing (albeit the kind of knowledge we can have, being fallible and capable of willful perversion of our intellect); Locke keeps us trying to figure out whether Ideas are what we know, or what we think with, or named mental states [however they occurred]. Locke’s approach still works, however, because at bottom he insists on an inevitable correspondence of world and mind (though all Western philosophy since has pointed out how overdetermined this result is):

For the objects of our senses do, many of them, obtrude their particular ideas upon our minds whether we will or no; and the operations of our minds will not let us be without, at least, some obscure notions of them. No man can be wholly ignorant of what he does when he thinks. These simple ideas, when offered to the mind, the understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter, when they are imprinted, nor blot them out, and make new ones itself, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which the objects set before it do therein produce. As the bodies that surround us do diversely affect our organs, the mind is forced to receive the impressions, and cannot avoid the perception of those ideas that are annexed to them.

(source: The Works of John Locke, vol. 1 (An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 1) – Online Library of Liberty)

If it were not for the negations and limitations imposed by the nominalism inherited precisely from his Schoolmen, the ones who so frustrated him, he would be able to plug his correct insight back into the matrix it would more richly inhabit.  In that matrix, the fitness of world and mind natural to human creatures follows from the presumption of teleology warranted by the self-revelation of the Creator, and the fallibility and perversity that has come to be natural to fallen human creatures is neither essential nor irremediable, so that we need not insist that the environment infallibly produces impressions in the mind to understand that the world is intelligible.

It seems abundantly clear to me that, over against both the decadence of his Schoolmen and his own milieu, Locke’s effort to defend empirical method pushes his philosophy back in the direction of Aquinas, whose defense of the efficacy of reasoning from particulars is at the very least hospitable to empirical science (but not at all to bifurcating irrationalism, materialism, secularism, etc).

Which is why I don’t see the need to set Locke and Aquinas at odds at all, and I’m puzzled that you seem to think we should.

As far as I can see, we either want concord between reason and revelation, in which case we want empirical science to frame its insights in a manner appropriate to its actual scope and efficacy; or we want confrontation, in which case by all means let us use the Psalms as guides to oceanography and tell Joshua he didn’t see the sun stand still because we couldn’t do that without destroying the planet.

The problem is that we want concord in a culture that wants unconditional surrender, a culture manipulated by powers that charge us with their hostilities when we don’t capitulate in advance!