Motus Mentis

I want to apologize to all of you who have been coming here over the past few months only to find little or no new content. I’ve written three articles this summer for publication elsewhere, but since my excruciating shoulder injury in July I’ve badly neglected the blog.

Since 2005 I’ve written over five thousand posts here; as my own views and focus have changed, the content of this site has changed from a breezy potpourri, sprinkled with posts about evolution, martial arts, and philosophy of mind, to a darker concentration on the long currents and cycles of history, religion, society, culture, political philosophy, and human diversity that make civilizations rise and fall, and that are making this one fall before our eyes.

In particular I’ve been gnawing for years now at the nature of the American Founding, and wondering whether the grave illness now threatening to put an end to that noble experiment is due to something “baked into” its originating principles, or to a failure to respect them and adhere to them.

In a post two years ago (one that prompted a stimulating exchange with the conservative writer Michael Anton) I wrote that I was “dogged by the question of just where things went off the rails in the West.” (See the linked series of posts here.)

Central to that question is this one: is the decay we see all around us in the early 21st century a result of the principles the American system was built upon, or did it occur in spite of them?

Every social system sturdy enough to achieve maturity faces this question when it reaches, sooner or later, a crisis of doubt and exhaustion. When this happens, there will always arise two factions in bitter opposition. One believes that the problem lies in laxity and infidelity regarding founding principles; the other calls into question the principles themselves. One side will argue that radical change has been foolish and destructive, and will call for a doubling down on original principles; the other will say that those principles are (at best) obsolete, and that the only way out is to double down on change itself. The pattern has repeated itself throughout history in nearly every complex human system, whether political, social, or religious — and in these last years it has brought the United States to the brink of civil war.

In the United States of 2018, the debate is almost entirely between a Left faction that calls for radical and accelerating change, and a Right that seeks a return to strict Constitutionalism, States’ rights, meritocracy, border control, diminution of Federal power, demographic stability, and individual liberty — in general, what today’s academic jargon would call a “re-centering” of the philosophy of the Founders. Listen to any of the prominent voices on the Right — whether it’s the Claremont or Hoover Institutes, or National Review, or Thomas Sowell, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or media personalities like Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh — and what you will hear is that the nation’s problem is that it has lost touch with the Enlightenment principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; with the philosophy of Locke and Hume and Montesquieu and Jefferson and Franklin and Madison.

There is a solid argument to be made that the blame here should indeed be laid upon “laxity and infidelity regarding founding principles”. Mr. Anton himself is a strong proponent of this view, whose primary intellectual bastions are the Claremont organization and Hillsdale College. Two recent books defending this position stand out, in my opinion: The Political Theory of the American Founding, by Thomas West, and America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, by Robert Reilly, which I am currently reading.

Related to all of this is the question of religious faith, and of the existence of God. A central problem, as I see it, is whether the natural-law underpinnings of the Founding are strong enough to hold up the Western (and particularly the American) edifice without reliance upon belief in God. Although Thomas West works hard in his book to shore them up with arguments built upon reason alone, even he acknowledges at the end of his summation that none of the arguments he presents suffice on their own. As I’ve moved away, over the years, from the “scientistic” atheism of my youth, I’ve come to the opinion that secularism is deeply maladaptive for human groups (see this post from eleven years ago, when I was still far less open to the possible existence of God than I am now). John Adams wrote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” I have had very little doubt for years now that he was right about this, even if the natural-law assumptions underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are left unexamined by most people, and usually glossed over even by intelligent, secular Americans. How many Americans, after all, burrow down to the philosophical roots of why the rule of law is itself good or just, or precisely how we can know that justice itself should depend on assumptions of absolute equality before the law? (Bear in mind that we already qualify this latter principle when defendants are on trial, for example by considering profoundly defective intelligence, and other questions of mental competence.)

Robert Reilly’s book brings exactly these questions sharply into focus, and in doing so identifies just what is at the heart of the struggle we see playing out in America’s culture (and in its streets) today. It is the conflict between two models of Creation itself, and the nature of Man. The first model is one in which reason and comprehensible order are primary, meaning that God’s creation — Logos — is a book that rational Man, himself created in the image of God, may read and be guided by. The second is a world created entirely by Will, in which there is no objective order, only whatever state of affairs God decrees from moment to moment. The terrible danger in this latter model is that if God is taken away, all that is left is the will of Man. The law, shorn of its transcendent origin in the rational mind of God, is simply whatever the sovereign says it is. What is good, what is just, even what is real — all of these things, unmoored from everything save human will, become nothing more than prizes of power. How can a constitutional order possibly survive in such conditions?

That second model is not new; even in Christendom it has been afoot since Ockham, and then Luther. But until our era it was checked, in part at least, by faith in the benevolence of God’s Will to maintain the Good. When faith in God dies, though, and belief in God becomes belief in Man, there is at last no restraint on the temptation of Man’s will to absolute power — and because that absolute power includes not only temporal sovereignty, but even the radical power to define what is good and what is just, the last check, that of conscience itself, vanishes as well. Everything, at last, is rendered unto Caesar.

So this is what I’ve been brooding about as I’ve watched the cities burn, and as all the natural categories and self-evident truths that have guided the nation since the Founding have been thrown on the pyre. Regardless of whether the Founding itself contained intrinsically fatal liabilities, it is clear, I think, that as we lose our belief in a transcendent foundation for natural law all becomes mere Will, and that under such a regime, the American nation as founded — or anything that would have been recognizable as America to anyone born before 1975 or so — cannot long endure. That may not bother some of my friends out there on the Nietzschean Right (you know who you are) but all I can say is: be careful what you wish for.