Descartes: commitment & community

I found a passage written by the philosopher Descartes which I thought interesting (it is from his letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, 1645). Descartes is recognised as a progenitor of modern thought, but he clearly did not support the radical individualism which has come to characterise liberal modernity. 

He writes:

After acknowledging the goodness of God, the immortality of our souls and the immensity of the universe, there is yet another truth that is, in my opinion, most useful to know. That is, that though each of us is a person distinct from others, whose interests are accordingly in some way different from those of the rest of the world, we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth. 

What I believe he gets right here is not only the idea that we are social creatures, but that we are a part of (i.e. we belong to as an aspect of our being) certain communities. Descartes clearly accepts that our membership of some of these communities is predetermined - that we are born into them. Unlike liberal moderns, he does not push the logic of individual autonomy to the point of rejecting unchosen forms of community.

René Descartes

The next part is more questionable:

And the interests of the whole, of which each of us is a part, must always be preferred to those of our own particular person —with measure, of course, and discretion, because it would be wrong to expose ourselves to a great evil in order to procure only a slight benefit to our kinsfolk or our country. (Indeed if someone were worth more, by himself, than all his fellow citizens, he would have no reason to destroy himself to save his city.) 

Understood a certain way, this makes sense. If I could make money in a way that betrayed my country, then I should certainly set aside my own financial self-interest in favour of preserving the national community I belong to. Even so, the introduction of a kind of moral calculus here rings false. It is also unhelpful, I think, to focus on the idea that there are occasions when it is morally right to destroy ourselves to preserve the community. More typically, in acting to uphold the good of the community we belong to, we are also preserving our own good, as our own good can only be fully realised in common with others.

Descartes continues:

But if someone saw everything in relation to himself, he would not hesitate to injure others greatly when he thought he could draw some slight advantage; and he would have no true friendship, no fidelity, no virtue at all. On the other hand, if someone considers himself a part of the community, he delights in doing good to everyone, and does not hesitate even to risk his life in the service of others when the occasion demands. If he could, he would even be willing to lose his soul to save others. So this consideration is the source and origin of all the most heroic actions done by men. 

Descartes is arguing against the idea that a society can be formed solely on the basis of individual self-interest. If I act solely from selfish motives, then there is no ground for important virtues like loyalty. If, though, I see myself as being part of a community, in the sense that it is an aspect of identity and belonging, this is likely to inspire my social commitments. Descartes' views have been supported by the research of Professor Robert Putnam, who found that when there is less ethnic solidarity, that people tend to "withdraw from collective life" and to "to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often". Descartes' basic argument here is also one I have often made myself, as for instance in defending the continuing existence of historic nations:

From this larger body we derive parts of our identity, our loves and attachments, our participation in a larger, transcendent tradition, our sense of pride and achievement, our social commitments, our attachments to place, whether to nature, landscape or urban environment, our connection to a particular cultural tradition, our commitments to maintaining moral and cultural standards, our sense of connectedness to both the history of our own people - to generations past - as well as our commitment to future generations.

I should pause, though, to question one part of Descartes' argument. He says that we should be willing to lose our souls to save others. Perhaps he wrote this for effect, but taken literally I think he is wrong.

Descartes writes in a similar vein:

A person seems to me more pitiful than admirable if he risks death from vanity, in the hope of praise, or through stupidity, because he does not apprehend the danger. But when a person risks death because he believes it to be his duty, or when he suffers some other evil to bring good to others, then he acts in virtue of the consideration that he owes more to the community of which he is a part than to himself as an individual, though this thought may be only confusedly in his mind without his reflecting upon it.

He connects this to a religious piety - to preferring to follow God's will rather than hedonic pleasures:

Once someone knows and loves God as he should, he has a natural impulse to think in this way; for then, abandoning himself altogether to God's will, he strips himself of his own interests, and has no other passion than to do what he thinks pleasing to God. Thus he acquires a mental satisfaction and contentment incomparably more valuable than all the passing joys which depend upon the senses.

In addition to these truths which concern all our actions in general, many others must be known which concern more particularly each individual action. The chief of these, in my view, are those I mentioned in my last letter: namely that all our passions represent to us the goods to whose pursuit they impel us as being much greater than they really are; and that the pleasures of the body are never as lasting as those of the soul, or as great in possession as they appear in anticipation. 

Descartes clearly considers our commitments to family and nation to be higher spiritual goods, through which we follow God's will for us, and are contrasted with a selfish pursuit of hedonic pleasure.

Although I do not subscribe to Descartes' larger philosophy, his views on this topic are preferable to those that were to develop later on, in which the individual was expected to pursue self-interest in the market (as Economic Man), and to develop solo as an individual outside of natural forms of community, with many intellectuals ultimately becoming not only disembedded from their own historic communities but actively hostile to them.

Pope Francis on love of homeland

Pope Francis is not exactly known for being a conservative in the Catholic Church, but nonetheless he recently made a good defence of patriotism. Speaking on the topic of the morality of defending one's own country, he stated:

To defend oneself is not only licit, it’s also an expression of love toward one’s homeland; whoever doesn’t defend something, doesn’t love it. Instead, those who defend, love.

I particularly like the way he framed this, as it captures something important about patriotism. When you belong to a genuine national tradition, you see the good in it, and this naturally draws our love - it becomes a love of a significant good, perhaps even a type of transcendent good (a good that draws us to a higher aspect of reality and of ourselves). It then becomes natural to want to defend this good, which is why people will make sacrifices to uphold their national tradition, including making commitments to family life, to raising the next generation, to wanting to maintain the moral standing of the nation they are a part of, to creating a worthy national culture and so on.

The Catholic Church has something of a mixed record on the issue of defence of homeland, and no doubt it was easier for Pope Francis to make his comments, given that he was supporting the right of Ukraine to obtain weapons, and Ukraine is currently considered a progressive cause. 

Still, there are many voices within the Catholic Church arguing for patriotism, so Catholics should not be pressured into thinking that they must support globalism. Cardinal Robert Sarah is one such voice:

Cardinal Sarah is aware that globalism favours a technocratic vision in which people become "fungible", i.e. become mutually interchangeable units of production or consumption to the detriment of their personhood.

Similarly, Cardinal Burke has given an extensive speech on the issue, drawing on the work of St Thomas Aquinas. Cardinal Burke concludes by rejecting a globalist agenda:

It is clear that we and our homelands have responsibilities within the international community, but those responsibilities can only be fulfilled through a sound life in the family and in the homeland. Patriotism, in fact, fosters the virtue of charity which clearly embraces citizens of other nations, recognising and respecting their distinct cultural and historical identity.

...The divine authority, in accord with the order written upon the human heart, does not make just and legitimate a single global government...On the contrary, God meets us and orders our lives for the good in the family and in the homeland.

 

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website. 

Cardinal Burke, Christianity & love of country

Cardinal Raymond Burke gave a speech last year on the issue of patriotism. It's worth reading as it affirms traditional Catholic teaching that many Catholics might not be aware of.

His speech is titled "Filial piety and national patriotism as essential virtues of the citizens of heaven at work on earth".

Cardinal Burke begins by reminding his listeners that there is a transcendent truth by which we should attempt to order our lives:

Our happiness during our earthly pilgrimage and at its destination, eternal life, depends on the conformity of our daily living with the truth, that is, with the good order with which God has created and sustains the world and, in a most particular way, man and woman.

But is a patriotic love of country an aspect of this truth, of this good order which God has created? According to the church it is, as a matter of justice, piety and charity.

How are these virtues connected to patriotism? Let's begin with piety. Cardinal Burke says,

It is the virtue of piety...which expresses our recognition of the truth and our humble obedience before the truth...Piety...inspires and strengthens us to live the truth of our being as creatures created in the image and likeness of God to know, love and serve Him...

I'll go off topic for a moment here to point out that liberalism is impious when it claims that there is only meaning when we author or define our own being, in any direction, according to our own designs.

To put it simply, piety is recognising that we are created by God, that this is a truth of our being, and that it is right to love and to serve God.

What does this have to do with patriotism? This can be explained in terms of the virtue of justice. Justice means giving what is due to others. We have a debt to those who have formed us, who are responsible for our being. If God is primary in this respect, as outlined above, our parents and our family are secondary, as is our country. Therefore, piety is rightly directed not only toward God but to giving due honour and reverence, love and service, and fulfilling our obligations and duties toward our family and our nation. In this sense, piety toward God rightly flows as well into piety toward family and nation. It is the same virtue, the same "obedience before the truth" and one that calls forth charity, an expression of love, in this case, of family and nation.

Cardinal Burke quotes the theologian Louis Bouyer who wrote (in 1963):

The virtues of filial piety and piety toward fatherland...are annexes of the virtue of justice

Cardinal Burke goes on to note that filial piety is included as one of the commandments:

While the Fourth Commandment commands us to honour our father and mother, to show to our parents the piety which flows from the recognition that they have cooperated with God in giving us the gift of human life, it also commands the piety owed to the wider community in which marriage and family are possible and indeed flourish.

This quote from St Thomas Aquinas is also significant:

I answer that, Man becomes a debtor to other men in various ways, according to their various excellence and the various benefits received from them. On both counts God holds first place, for He is supremely excellent, and is for us the first principle of being and government. In the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.

Cardinal Burke comments:

It is clear from the Angelic Doctor’s exposition that, not only is patriotism not a sin, but it is a requirement of nature itself. The term, worship, when applied to one’s parents and one’s country, as St Thomas makes clear, is distinct from divine worship which is given to God alone. The second sense of worship is analogous and refers to the piety or devotion shown to those who cooperate with God for our good.

The New Catholic Encylopedia puts all this very clearly:

But patriotism as a form of charity, or love, has a more specific object in its actuation than mankind or the human family as such. According to St Thomas Aquinas, the particular love of one’s fatherland is an important aspect of that preferential form of charity that is called pietas. Through piety the person has an obligation of love to God, parents, and fatherland. Each is in some sense a principle of man’s being: God through creation; parents through procreation and education; fatherland through a formation of one’s cultural and historical identity.

It is also worth noting Cardinal Burke's comment on this passage:

Patriotism is an aspect of the grace of piety, which in its turn is an essential part of the matter of charity. Christ gives the grace of piety, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, in order that we can live the truth of our human nature.

Patriotism as such is a precept of the natural law.

That's a powerful way to understand the issue.

Cardinal Burke understands as well the importance of nations in fostering intergenerational loyalties, so that we do not fall into the "presentism" of liberal modernity:

This piety is at once a deeply personal virtue and a powerful force to bring together the generations, allowing the young to take root in the soil of the old and the old to engraft their experiences onto the young, so that we sense that home is a place where the passing day partakes of long ages past and to come.

From the Catholic catechism:

[t]he love and service of one’s country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity

Finally, Cardinal Burke states very clearly the opposition of the Catholic Church to the replacement of nations by a world government:

It is clear that we and our homelands have responsibilities within the international community, but those responsibilities can only be fulfilled through a sound life in the family and in the homeland. Patriotism, in fact, fosters the virtue of charity which clearly embraces citizens of other nations, recognising and respecting their distinct cultural and historical identity.

...The divine authority, in accord with the order written upon the human heart, does not make just and legitimate a single global government...On the contrary, God meets us and orders our lives for the good in the family and in the homeland.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

UK judge: Christian belief incompatible with human dignity

The UK was once a very Christian nation. I've been reading a biography of the radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: The Pursuit), who, unusually for his time, was an atheist. In 1811 he met his future wife Harriet Westbrook. This is how she described her initial reaction to his beliefs:

You may conceive with what horror I first heard that Percy was an Atheist...at first I did not comprehend the meaning of the word; therefore when it was explained I was truly petrified. (p.67)

But how things have changed. A UK judge has recently declared Christian belief to be incompatible with human dignity. In a way, this is not surprising, as Christianity does not fit in with the ruling state ideology in the UK, namely liberalism.

The story runs as follows. Dr David Mackereth was employed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as a disability assessor. He was queried by a supervisor about whether he would, hypothetically, refer to a 6ft tall bearded man by female pronouns. He answered that he couldn't in conscience do this given his Christian belief that we are created male or female by God (Genesis 1:27) and that we cannot change our sex according to our own will.

There is some dispute about whether or not Dr Mackereth was then directly dismissed from his position or not, but regardless the case ended up at an employment tribunal hearing. Judge Perry found in favour of the DWP and it is the reasons he gave for his decision which are the most significant part of the story.

Judge Perry began by noting that according to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion

So what's the catch? Well, another judge, J Burton, (in the case of Grainger v Nicholson) defined what constituted an acceptable "philosophical belief" or religion. And one of his criteria was the following:

(v) It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others

Judge Perry then ruled that:

belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.

And this:

We accept Dr Mackereth’s account that his beliefs are inherent to his wider faith. In so far as those beliefs form part of his wider faith, his wider faith also does not satisfy Grainger.

According to Judge Perry, the orthodox Christian view "does not satisfy" the criteria for acceptable belief in a society because it is incompatible with human dignity and conflicts with the fundamental rights of others. Therefore, orthodox Christianity is not protected under the convention of human rights.

The underlying problem is not that Christianity is incompatible with human dignity but that it is incompatible with liberalism. A Christian might argue that the belief that our male and female natures are God-given and a part of God's plan for us enhances the dignity of our persons. But for a liberal human dignity comes from the act of autonomous choice in which we self-determine our own personhood.

For a Christian, the moral thing is to fully develop our given natures as men and women, i.e. to order ourselves toward ideals or standards of masculine and feminine virtue. We discern what is best within our masculine and feminine natures and attempt to fully develop these qualities, as a way of completing ourselves and meeting one of our missions in life (our telos).

For a liberal, the moral thing is not only to author our own identity but to respect the right of others to do the same. Because liberals do not like the idea of a given nature, it will be held to be particularly moral to act against "stereotypes" when it comes to masculinity or femininity (hence the banning in the UK earlier this year of a car ad which briefly portrayed a mother sitting next to a pram, the image being ruled to be a harmful and offensive stereotype).

Given the logic of the situation, it seems naive to me to expect that orthodox Christianity will be well tolerated within a liberal system. Either it will change to fit in better with liberalism (which usually means becoming irrelevant, as it then loses its animating principles) or else it will have to more self-consciously recognise the difficulty of the situation and use whatever power it has to defend its own place in society.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Cardinal Sarah: the tragic error

Cardinal Sarah continues to lead the way. When asked in an interview with Nicolas Diat about the collapse of the West he replied:

The spiritual collapse thus has a very Western character. In particular, I would like to emphasize the rejection of fatherhood. Our contemporaries are convinced that, in order to be free, one must not depend on anybody. There is a tragic error in this. Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons. But civilized man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian. To refuse to be inscribed within a network of dependence, heritage, and filiation condemns us to go back naked into the jungle of a competitive economy left to its own devices. Because he refuses to acknowledge himself as an heir, man is condemned to the hell of liberal globalization in which individual interests confront one another without any law to govern them besides profit at any price.

He is right in identifying the tragic error as being a false understanding of freedom. Liberals understand freedom as individual autonomy. If you want to maximise your autonomy you will downplay those aspects of life that you are born into rather than choosing for yourself. You will want to imagine yourself to be wholly self-created or self-authored. That's why those brought up in a liberal culture often reflexively reject the instinct to take pride in the achievements of their family, community or nation - they object because they didn't personally bring about the achievement as an individual.

Liberals imagine that they are being progressive in pushing forward such an individualistic view of man, but Cardinal Sarah rightly points out that higher civilisation is marked by complex forms of inheritance that the individual accepts as his patrimony but that he must then contribute to as his own legacy for future generations.

The following from Cardinal Sarah is also interesting:

I want to suggest to Western people that the real cause of this refusal to claim their inheritance and this refusal of fatherhood is the rejection of God. From Him we receive our nature as man and woman. This is intolerable to modern minds. Gender ideology is a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God. Thus some rebel against God and pointlessly mutilate themselves in order to change their sex. But in reality they do not fundamentally change anything of their structure as man or woman. The West refuses to receive, and will accept only what it constructs for itself. Transhumanism is the ultimate avatar of this movement. Because it is a gift from God, human nature itself becomes unbearable for western man.

This revolt is spiritual at root. It is the revolt of Satan against the gift of grace. Fundamentally, I believe that Western man refuses to be saved by God’s mercy. He refuses to receive salvation, wanting to build it for himself. The “fundamental values” promoted by the UN are based on a rejection of God that I compare with the rich young man in the Gospel. God has looked upon the West and has loved it because it has done wonderful things. He invited it to go further, but the West turned back. It preferred the kind of riches that it owed only to itself.

Cardinal Sarah is suggesting here that the underlying source of the error plaguing Western societies is humanism in general and secular humanism in particular. I know the word "humanism" has nice connotations, sounding as if it means "being in support of humans". But as Cardinal Sarah argues, it is usually associated with ideas about humanity having a kind of telos (an ultimate end or purpose) that humans themselves bring about (sometimes in partnership with God, sometimes not). Cardinal Sarah is blaming a kind of hubris, by which some people are unable to accept what is given as part of a created nature or order, even if there is a goodness contained within it. Part of this hubris is an unwillingness to defer - a lack of "humility" in the best sense of this word.

Finally, Cardinal Sarah is right that the logical end point is transsexualism and transhumanism, as these represent the ultimate in asserting self-authorship. A case in point from my social media feed this morning:

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Cardinal Robert Sarah: You must not sacrifice your national identities

Cardinal Robert Sarah is one of those outstanding men leading the resistance to liberal modernity. He gave an interview recently; the following excerpt focuses on the issue of identity.

You also write that the modern world destroys by attacking [national and religious] identities. You, on the contrary, defend this rootedness that Simone Weil described as the first need of the human soul. That makes you a somewhat isolated voice in a Church that sometimes seems to have become a mere auxiliary of the pro-immigration party.

When I went to Poland [in October 2017], a country that is often criticized, I encouraged the faithful to affirm their identity as they have done for centuries. My message was simple: you are first Poles, Catholics, and only then Europeans. You must not sacrifice these first two identities on the altar of a technocratic Europe that acknowledges no fatherland. The Brussels Commission thinks only of constructing a free market in the service of the major financial powers. The European Union no longer protects the peoples [within it]. It protects the banks. I wanted to restate for Poland its unique mission in God’s plan. She is free to tell Europe that everyone was created by God to be put in a precise place, with its culture, its traditions and its history. This current desire to globalize the world by getting rid of nations with their specific characteristics is sheer madness. The Jewish people had to go into exile, but God brought them back to their country. Christ had to flee from Herod into Egypt, but he returned to his country upon the death of Herod. Everyone must live in his country. Like a tree, each one has his soil, his milieu where he flourishes perfectly. It is better to help people to flourish in their culture than to encourage them to come to a Europe that is completely decadent. It is false exegesis to use the Word of God to improve the image of migration. God never intended these rifts.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

The good course

The current Pope is not a great respecter of nations. He has, for instance, just recently proclaimed that illegal immigrants must have the right to remain, without detention and with full access to social welfare - which is in practice a call for open borders and mass flows of migration.

But it was not always so. In 1920 Pope Benedict was alarmed by the conditions in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. He issued a motu proprio titled "Bonum Sane" or "The good course".

He identified a series of problems, including class conflict and a breakdown in family life. He believed that the war had had a negative effect on the family:

the sanctity of conjugal faith and respect for the paternal authority have been many people not so vulnerable because of the war; and because the distance of one of the spouses has slowed down the bond of duty in the other, and because the absence of a watchful eye has given the opportunity to inconsiderateness, especially female, to live on their own talent and too freely. Therefore we must find with real sorrow that now the public customs are much more depraved and corrupt than before...

It's a poor translation, but the gist of it seems to be that the war, in separating husbands and wives and making women more independent, harmed the sense of duty of the spouses to each other, allowed them (especially the women) to live too freely (i.e. without concern for the good of the family), and undermined respect for paternal authority.

But it is what follows on from this that is of most interest. Pope Benedict XV, concerned about the socialist upheavals in parts of Europe at this time in history, issued this warning:

Therefore we must find with real sorrow that now the public customs are much more depraved and corrupt than before, and that therefore the so-called " social question " has been aggravated to such an extent as to generate the threat of irreparable ruins. The advent of a Universal Republic, which is longed for by all the worst elements of disorder, and confidently expected by them, is an idea which is now ripe for execution. From this republic, based on the principles of absolute equality of men and community of possessions, would be banished all national distinctions, nor in it would the authority of the father over his children, or of the public power over the citizens, or of God over human society, be any longer acknowledged. If these ideas are put into practice, there will inevitably follow a reign of unheard-of terror. Already, even now, a large portion of Europe is going through that doleful experience and We see that it is sought to extend that awful state of affairs to other regions.

Pope Benedict XV believed that it was the "worst elements of disorder" that were pushing for the abolition of "all national distinctions". He connects this drive to abolish national distinctions to a demand for an "absolute equality of men" which doesn't stop at internationalism but has wider repercussions, also undermining family, church and society.

What is striking is that the Church in 1920 did not side with the forces of dissolution but set itself resolutely against them.

Tim Farron: the cure for liberal tyranny is liberalism?

Tim Farron was, until recently, the leader of the British Liberal Democrats. He is a serious Christian as well as a serious liberal. But he is starting to think that things are going wrong. Seriously wrong.

He gave a speech last month in which he acknowledged that liberalism has become an orthodoxy:

Liberalism has apparently won. Even members of the Conservative and Labour parties call themselves liberals today. Let’s be honest, you can’t work in the media without being a liberal. Even most of the journalists who write for the right wing press are in truth liberals.

Despite my best efforts, the Liberal Democrats have not won. But irrespective of my efforts, Liberalism has.

The problem for Tim Farron is that the dominance of liberalism has led it to impose itself on society to the point that it is becoming difficult to be a serious Christian:

My observation is that for many years now our culture has considered that the absence of faith is the neutral position, and that the holding of a religious faith is eccentric. In other words, an absence of faith is the standard assumption around which we build our social structures, and if you have a faith we will consider you to be eccentric in the whacky and harmless sense… so we will tolerate you, as long as you remain on the edges.

What appears now to be happening is that while the absence of faith is still thought to be the neutral position, holding a faith is only considered to be tolerably eccentric if it is merely cultural. But if your faith actually affects your world view in any way that puts it at odds with the mainstream, then your faith is considered to be malign and intolerable.

Tim Farron believes that modern liberalism is becoming a "respectable tyranny" and that,

my hypothesis today is that in this country and across the world, Liberalism will eat itself. Is eating itself. May already have eaten itself.

He notes too that liberal secularism leads to a narrow concept of human life, that it "reduces everyone down to either consumer or regulatory units...We’ve been atomised."

What is his solution? He argues that liberals should go back in time, to the liberalism of J.S. Mill, in which there would be a pluralistic society in which different world views would be tolerated. He also argues that Christianity in particular should be tolerated as liberalism rests on certain philosophical beliefs drawn from Christianity (i.e. that liberalism puts itself at risk if it discards Christianity).

I don't think he grasps the problem adequately in making these arguments. There is a logic to the core beliefs of liberalism which sets it at odds with Christianity.

The liberal starting point sounds OK for establishing pluralism. One of the core liberal beliefs, after all, is that individuals should be free to pursue their own goods as long as in doing so there is no interference with the right of others to do the same.

But to make this work it helps if liberals look on their preferences as being subjective or private. That way their preferences don't infringe on the validity of what others might choose. Let's say, for instance, that I choose as a man to marry a woman. If I am a liberal, it would be awkward if I asserted that this represents an objective good, i.e. a preference that is rightly ordered. If I were to do so it would suggest that marrying someone of the same sex is not a valid choice. I would be invalidating someone else's preferences and identity, a violation that would draw down on me the liberal moral reproach that I was being "bigoted" or "intolerant" or "prejudiced".

Similarly, it suits a liberal culture if there is thought to be nothing in the nature of reality itself to limit what I might choose to do or to be. That then means that these is less to limit my autonomous choice, which is a marker of human status and dignity for liberals. It is better from the liberal point of view if I am a blank slate so that I can be wholly the author of my own life. Better if there are 1000 sexes rather than just two. Better if race is just a social construct. Better if there is no natural law to constrain or to guide my moral choices.

Remember too that for liberals a progress toward a society where there is "equal freedom" to pursue our subjective goods is a matter of social justice, of equal dignity, of human flourishing, and of realising the ultimate ends of humanity. It is the source of hope, of liberation and of meaning. Many liberals will therefore think it offensive, or demoralising or deeply unjust if anyone violates liberal precepts. In particular, liberals will want to push forward with the liberal agenda, so that they can see "progress" being manifested in society. And "progress" will eventually catch up with those who are holding out.

So those initial core beliefs, which sound as if they might allow for pluralism, have an inner logic which drives toward an intolerance of whatever violates liberalism itself. The end result is that you can choose anything...as long as you choose liberalism.

And Christianity can't be made to fit easily into an acceptable liberal framework. After all, Christians do not see morality as merely a subjective preference. The Christian attitude is not that anything you choose is equally good, as long as it is not coerced. A Christian will assert instead that there is a moral order, external to the individual ("prior" to the individual) which provides the framework for our moral choices. We become free to the extent that we are not subject to moral evil.

Imagine if a Christian agreed to the liberal standard, and assented to the idea that moral choices are just subjective preferences, in which no matter what we choose we could just as morally have chosen something else. Surely that would be demoralising, in the sense that it would undermine Christianity as a serious belief about the nature of existence.

This does not mean that the only acceptable social framework for a Christian is a theocracy. Christianity existed for a long time with a distinct role allotted for church and state. But the concept of politics that would best fit with Christianity would be one in which a community recognised that men have a given biological, social and spiritual nature and that the aim is to best understand each of these and then attempt to integrate them into a way of life.

How to decide how to do this? Well, through the life of a community at different levels, including the political, over time. What would happen in practice is that a generation would inherit a particular tradition, i.e. an understanding of a way of life, and would then seek to influence it for the better, through a debate about philosophy and religion, through culture and education, through the care of parents for their children, and to some extent through reforms to governance and law.

Every community will make mistakes along the way. None will harmonise the different aspects of the nature of existence perfectly. It will always be a work in progress, with real improvement taking place over generations. The more a community gets it right, the more likely it is to establish solid foundations.

Liberalism doesn't allow the process to work well. How, for instance, can you try to encourage the better masculine qualities of men, and then integrate these into family and social life, if you start with the assumption that men are blank slates and that masculinity itself is a false and oppressive social construct? You never get out of the starting blocks, but are forced instead into low level debates about whether sex distinctions even exist and whether they should be tolerated if they do.

Tim Farron knows where things are heading. He can see that Christianity will be increasingly marginalised within liberal modernity. That it will be tolerated only if it becomes "cultural". He is wrong, though, to think that things can be put right by rewinding liberalism so that it becomes tolerant again. Liberalism will just spring back according to the logic of its first principles. If you repair it, it will set to work in a predictable way, just as it did before. It needs replacing.

Jordan Peterson - the path is narrow

I've posted below a short video of a lecture by Jordan Peterson. It is bracingly countercultural. The liberal assumption is that we live in an existential vacuum in which we are free to choose in any direction. Jordan Peterson's experience as a clinical psychologist is that this is not so, and that there is a moral order that the individual cannot transgress without consequences:

A rad trad criticism of liberalism

Some readers might find this interesting. It's a description of the outlook of radical traditionalists within the Catholic Church. There is clearly an overlap with the criticism of liberalism I have made at this site:

The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefitting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. According to this view, liberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism, among which (Catholics hold) are the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

Because of these positions, the “radical” position—while similarly committed to the pro-life, pro-marriage teachings of the Church—is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government. It is comfortable with neither party, and holds that the basic political division in America merely represents two iterations of liberalism—the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere (liberalism) or the economic realm (“conservatism”—better designated as market liberalism).

This is a principled criticism of liberalism, one that reaches down to first principles. I was especially interested in the final observation - that the mainstream parties are usually just "two iterations of liberalism," with the left wing party oriented to "the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere" and the right wing party being oriented to the pursuit of individual autonomy in the economic realm.

Regular readers will know that I agree with this understanding of mainstream politics (though the emergence of an anti-globalist right is starting to modify the political landscape).

What is allowed in a liberal system?

I get to keep up with what my liberal friends are thinking through social media. There was one social media post by a friend of mine (white, heterosexual, male) which recently caught my attention. The gist of it was as follows:

1. Donald Trump has withdrawn taxpayer funding for charities promoting abortion.
2. This will affect the health of poor women overseas and is therefore immoral.
3. This is a case of Christian men deliberately attacking poor women.
4. Religion is used by men to uphold the patriarchy in order to oppress poor women.

It ended with this: "The only way forward is to ensure we leave behind the shackles of enslavement promoted by religion and the religious. Faith is one thing. Religion is enslavement."

Now this is interesting, as it is another step along the liberal path that the West has been treading for many generations. As it happens, James Kalb has just written an article about this very feature of liberalism. He explains:

Social issues are messy. They have to do with basic human connections, orientations, and aspects of identity. These include family, cultural community, religion, and relations between the sexes. So they have to do with basic and very complicated aspects of life that people feel strongly about.

That causes problems for people who run things today. Their ideal of reason and principle of legitimacy means they want to handle everything through supposedly rational, neutral, and transparent institutions like global markets and expert bureaucracies. But personal loyalties, ultimate commitments, and ideas about how best to live can’t be sold, traded, bureaucratized, or turned over to experts. So from the standpoint of liberal institutions they are unmanageable and incomprehensible. They mess things up.

The result is that our rulers refuse to deal with them on their own terms but insist on treating them as private hobbies or consumption choices that shouldn’t be allowed to affect anything.

As an example of treating things as "private hobbies" consider the issue of how white liberals deal with their own ethnic ancestry. It is considered permissible for a white liberal to identify positively with their own ancestry (English, Scottish, German or whatever) as long as this remains at the reduced level of a private sentiment. What is not permitted is for him to defend the continuing existence of his ancestry as part of public policy.

And so with religion. It makes sense for my friend, under the terms of liberalism, to think that a private faith is acceptable, whereas organised religion is not. The first keeps things private and individual, the second can potentially have influence in society.

The problem, of course, is that many of our deepest loyalties, loves and attachments are exercised as part of a community - they cannot be reduced to the individual level. You can only exercise your role as a father within a family; your wider kinship identity within an ethny; your membership of a religious tradition within a church and so on.

These identities and attachments cannot be defended within a liberal system. And so the liberal individual tends to substitute them with lifestyle activities: the liberal individual turns instead to food, shopping, career, sex, entertainments and so on. He may even, to satisfy a need, become a spectator to the traditions of others that he does not allow for himself.

James Kalb goes on to point out that this aspect of liberalism can be traced all the way back to the seventeenth century:

Liberal theory, like liberal practice, wants to keep things simple, comprehensible, and manageable. The social issues are complicated, and the idea of a social contract—which has been basic to liberal theory since Hobbes and Locke—is a way of avoiding them. Instead of basing society on inherited or transcendent loyalties or some conception of the good life, social contract theory tells us to put such things aside and view society as a collection of equal individuals who think they can advance their own goals by establishing a legal order based on neutral standards of equality and personal choice.

The approach sounds good to a lot of people but it has consequences that aren’t pleasing. If we’re all equal independent individuals with our own idiosyncratic goals, then informal authorities like cultural tradition vanish, and the social order is no more than the legal and commercial order. Anything else that becomes influential enough to be worth noticing, like informal expectations regarding behavior, is illegitimate and oppressive if it doesn’t directly support the liberal order. That’s why both Mrs. Clinton and international human rights conventions tell us that if religious and cultural patterns don’t line up with liberal ideals, for example with regard to feminism and abortion, we—meaning those in power—must change them.

I'll finish with another good excerpt from Kalb's article:

The project of creating a society in which arrangements like family, religion, and ethnic ties and culture don’t matter is based on the idea that those things have no legitimate or rational function. Swede or Somali, Christian, Muslim, or Jew, man, woman, or other, however we identify, whatever our preferred pronouns or domestic arrangements, we are all equally consumers, employees, and functionaries in a global society that recognizes only markets and neutral expert bureaucracies as authoritative institutions. That’s where the serious business of life goes on, and everything else should be recognized as freely chosen hobbies, indulgences, fantasies, or personal consumption choices.

That’s the view, but it makes no sense, because sex, religion, and communal membership are ineradicably at the center of people’s understanding of themselves and their connection to others.

The era of feminised Christianity

Dalrock has an interesting post up about a shift in Christianity said to have taken place around the year 1800. According to Professor Callum Brown, the Britain of the period 1800 to 1963 was a religious one, but during this period Christianity was feminised. In the introduction to his work The Death of Christian Britain Brown writes:

...The book focuses considerable attention on how piety was conceived as an overwhelmingly feminine trait which challenged masculinity and left men demonized and constantly anxious. It was modern evangelicalism that raised the piety of woman, the ‘angel in the house’, to reign over the moral weakness and innate temptations of masculinity.

The typical understanding amongst Christians of the era was that women were naturally good, but that men were roughly natured and tempted to drink, gambling, womanising and so on, until the influence of a good woman brought them around.

I am not an expert on the religious history of the era, but this does explain some of the beliefs about masculinity that were present in the Australia I grew up in as a boy in the 1970s. There was an idea around back then that men were supposed to be more roughly natured than women, coarser in their manners, hard-drinking, brawling and so on. You can see it over and over in the Australian films of the 1970s. Only there was no being rescued by the influence of women; the idea of Christian conversion had dropped off by then.

It seemed a dodgy concept of masculinity to me at the time (drinking beer didn't seem much of a test of manhood) and this whole understanding of men and women has since come crashing down. It is now difficult to see women as more finely-natured, or naturally good or pious than men. What the modern era has revealed is that unless the men of a society are willing to establish a moral frame that supports a stable family life, then that society is likely to decline.

Dalrock has assembled much evidence that there are still church leaders who uphold the older narrative of women being naturally good and only being injured by men's failures, including conservative church leaders, some of whom are perhaps trying to conserve the view from the nineteenth century that really ought to be jettisoned.

One final point. The nineteenth century Christian view has survived in the secular world too. Think of all the TV sitcoms, including shows like The Simpsons, that portray a humorous and sanitised version of the idea that females are the naturally virtuous ones (think Marge or Lisa) and men the wayward, reckless ones captive to temptation (Homer, Bart).

Dalai Lama: Germany cannot become an Arab country. Germany is Germany.

The Dalai Lama has given an interview to a German newspaper in which he expressed intelligent concerns about Germany's open borders refugee policy. Here is the complete text:

Interviewer: What do you feel about the present refugee crisis in Europe?

Dalai Lama: When we look into the face of every single refugee, especially the children and women, we feel their suffering. A person who is better off has the responsibility to help them. On the other hand, there are now too many. Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country. Germany is Germany. There are so many, that it is difficult in practice. Also, looked at morally I think that these refugees should only be accepted temporarily. The aim should be that they return and help with the reconstruction of their own countries.

He is combining a concern for the refugees (he doesn't recognise that many are economic migrants); with a practical concern about the scale of the influx; with a moral concern that nations are able to retain their own distinctive character; and with another moral concern that people work for the benefit of their own nations.

It's a more sophisticated position than we usually get from our own church or political leaders.

Cupitt vs Schall revisited

The video of the American college students now has over a million views on Youtube. If you remember, the video shows students from the University of Washington telling a white male interviewer that they would accept his claim to be seven years old, or Chinese, or female.

The video has been posted to a number of sites and has attracted many hundreds of negative comments, many mocking the students' views. But few of the comments have really identified the underlying problem, namely that the students are only expressing the logic of the liberal belief system they have been brought up with.

I wrote a post as far back as 2006, contrasting the views of two religious ministers, Don Cupitt and Father James Schall. Cupitt claims that we as humans are "outsideless" - that there is nothing of inherent value outside the individual. Cupitt's beliefs are described this way:

Realism is now understood by Cupitt as, 'spiritual slavery', nothing more than an imposition and restriction onto the world of free-choice and free-values. Morality is synonymous with freedom; the freedom to grow into an autonomous person. There is no longer any fixed truth by which one must align and judge oneself. We are free (and must be freed) to be who we want to be.

The key thought here is this: "There is no longer any fixed truth by which one must align and judge oneself." Traditionalists like myself do believe that there are standards external to the individual (that transcend the individual) that the individual orients himself to and attempts to measure up to. We believe, for instance, that masculinity is not just socially constructed but has a real essence that a man can either more or less successfully attempt to embody and that connects an individual man to a higher, transcendent good. It is an objective measure of how we fulfil our given nature; of how we embody a significant and meaningful good; and of how we fulfil our higher purposes in life. It would make little sense for a traditionalist man to decide to take on a female identity - this would not be thought of as "liberation" but as a disordered orientation.

One of the problems with the liberal modernist view is that whilst it expands choice it does so at the cost of making what we choose purely subjective and therefore less meaningful. Here, for instance, is a statement from the website of Don Cupitt's church:

Truths are made within human culture and language. Ideas, beliefs, faiths: we made them up ... So SoF proclaims its mission: "To explore and promote religious faith as a human creation." In this sense, Sea of Faith is humanist."

Its members ... know their religious practices and "truths," like everyone else's, are socially constructed, made by human communities ...

Father James Schall has answered the Cupitt position eloquently:

The initial choice that each of us has to make in life is whether we think the world and ourselves already exist with some intelligible content to define what we are or whether there is nothing there but what we put there...The trouble with being so absolutely free that nothing is presupposed, however, is that what is finally put there is also only ourselves.

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about lately. The issue under consideration is what brought the West to adopt liberal modernist beliefs. One angle I haven't considered much before is the way that God was conceived of in the Christian West. In pagan societies, the deities might act wilfully and arbitrarily - therefore, they might have to be propitiated with sacrifices. I have read as well that in Islam something is made good because it is the will of Allah that it be so - so again, what matters is the will of the deity. But in the medieval West there was not a deity ruling wilfully over a chaotic universe, but rather a divine order, i.e. reality was divinely ordered, even to the point that a hierarchy of beings might be identified.

The concept gives much spiritual depth to man's existence and it is also likely to stimulate man's efforts to use his reason to understand the reality he inhabits. But it has its weak points as well - it has to withstand evidence that the material world is not designed in as straightforward a way as might be imagined (e.g. consider the setbacks to Christian belief through the discovery of the fossil records).

Liberal modernity might be, in part, a reaction to a loss of belief in the existence of a divine order. Here, for instance, is how one Cupitt sympathiser describes his outlook:

Religion ... becomes like art. Christians are artists, creators of truths. We give up the notion of a divinely ordained hierarchical universe that we just slot into. We have always created ethics.

Instead of God the creator, it is now Man the creator. Instead of a universe in which moral values have a real existence, moral values instead are made up by humans.

I'm not sure that this is a key aspect of what has happened, but it's something worth considering.

The Gosford signs

Australia must be one of the few nations to have a public holiday for a horse race, the Melbourne Cup. It has been called the race that stops the nation which is why one left-wing Anglican minister put up this sign:

It's a criticism of the Australian Government's policy of stopping the boats carrying illegal immigrants before they reach Australia.

I was curious to learn more about the Gosford Anglicans and their minister, Father Rod Bower. The first thing I found out is that there are many more such signs:

You might think that a flamboyant Christian minister might be a little more cautious in supporting the Islamification of Australia. After all, recent event in the Middle East include the wiping out of ancient Christian communities that once numbered millions and the formation of a caliphate which has imposed brutal executions for homosexuals.

Father Bower has considered this issue, at least briefly. It seems that the flooding of hundreds of thousands of immigrants into Europe this year has given him pause for thought. He does not believe, though, that extremism will ever happen in Australia for two reasons.

First:

We live in a world of extremes. We must not, however, fall into he trap of believing that all these extremes are easily transportable to Australia. We do not have the porous borders of Europe and no matter what the scaremongers say it not possible for people to enter without notice or permission.

Australia is in the unique position of being able to intentionally and systematically receive refugees and to enable them to contribute their own unique gifts to our ever-evolving culture.

This argument seems contradictory. We are reassured by Father Bower that we have nothing to fear because Australia does not have porous borders and can "systematically receive refugees"; at the same time, though, he believes fiercely that Australia should make its borders more porous and our immigration policy less systematic by allowing people to be smuggled into the country.

Here's another contradiction. Father Bower was very critical of Tony Abbot's speech in England, in which Abbott urged Europe to adopt the Australian system of detaining illegal arrivals. But if, as Father Bower states, Europe is in danger of extremism because of its porous borders, then surely the Europeans ought to follow Abbott's advice, or something like it.

This aside, Father Bower might like to consider that it has often been the children of the first arrivals who have committed acts of terrorism, so even screening on arrival does not rule out future problems.

Father Bower also believes that we are in no danger from Islamification because:

We are a rational people who reject extremism of all types whether it is religious or political. As Archbishop William Temple said “we are not moderately passionate, we are passionately moderate." In this exceptional land we have a unique opportunity to build a harmonious, diverse and life-giving society.

Interesting how this is massaged a certain way. Father Bower's liberal moderns do not just reject religious extremism, they mostly reject religion as a whole. In Gosford, Anglicans are outnumbered by atheists by 25% to 18%. Father Bower, as a minister of the cloth, might perhaps think twice before identifying too closely with a mainstream liberal culture.

I note too that Archbishop William Temple himself may not have been as keen on Islamifying Australia as Father Bower is. He wrote in his work Church and Nation (preface xi):

We all know about Turkey; it is the essentially Mohammedan power and Mohammedanism is the religion of oppression; it believes in imposing its faith by means of the sword.

Also, it is not so much a question of whether "we" are a rational and moderate people, but whether the future waves will be equally so.

And, finally, it's difficult to see recent social developments as being "passionately moderate". Is it "passionately moderate" to use migration to dissolve the distinct Western peoples? Or to reimagine nations as being something like large-scale business ventures? Or to dissolve the culture and the social supports that once supported a stable family life?

The old church was different

Was the Catholic Church always in favour of an anti-national universalism? The answer is clearly no. Bonald, for instance, has found an encyclical of Pope Pius XII from 1939 in which there is a harmonising of the claims of patriotism and universalism. Bonald has posted a longer transcript (worth reading), but I'll try a summary.

Pope Pius begins with a reminder of the basis of the unity of humankind:

that law of human solidarity and charity which is dictated and imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men, to whatever people they belong, and by the redeeming Sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ on the Altar of the Cross to His Heavenly Father on behalf of sinful mankind.

But this doesn't mean that nations don't have an important place:

And the nations, despite a difference of development due to diverse conditions of life and of culture, are not destined to break the unity of the human race, but rather to enrich and embellish it by the sharing of their own peculiar gifts and by that reciprocal interchange of goods which can be possible and efficacious only when a mutual love and a lively sense of charity unite all the sons of the same Father and all those redeemed by the same Divine Blood.

There is no contradiction between the unity of the human race and our membership of nations - that is what Pope Pius is emphasising here.

To further underline the point Pope Pius goes on to say:

The Church of Christ, the faithful depository of the teaching of Divine Wisdom, cannot and does not think of deprecating or disdaining the particular characteristics which each people, with jealous and intelligible pride, cherishes and retains as a precious heritage.

And then this:

The Church hails with joy and follows with her maternal blessing every method of guidance and care which aims at a wise and orderly evolution of particular forces and tendencies having their origin in the individual character of each race, provided that they are not opposed to the duties incumbent on men from their unity of origin and common destiny.

The balance here is good. We cannot treat those not of our tradition in any way we like, as we share a common humanity; however, the church blesses the effort to wisely develop the unique tradition we belong to.

Pope Pius then goes on to speak about the proper role of the state:

Hence, it is the noble prerogative and function of the State to control, aid and direct the private and individual activities of national life that they converge harmoniously towards the common good. That good can neither be defined according to arbitrary ideas nor can it accept for its standard primarily the material prosperity of society, but rather it should be defined according to the harmonious development and the natural perfection of man. It is for this perfection that society is designed by the Creator as a means.

The state should not be "something ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated and directed". In particular, the state should not usurp the role of the family. Parents have an important and independent role in guiding the formation of their children:

Undoubtedly, that formation should aim as well at the preparation of youth to fulfill with intelligent understanding and pride those offices of a noble patriotism which give to one’s earthly fatherland all due measure of love, self-devotion and service.

What cannot be reconciled

Jim Kalb has written a very good piece for a Catholic magazine (the points he makes should be of interest to non-Catholics as well).

It is about the fundamental opposition between the world view of Catholics and secular liberals:

That opposition leads to views of morality and justice in which drastically different claims and authorities carry weight. The Church values conscience, and accepts “this is right”—in general, this expresses the moral nature of a world that after all is God’s creation—as a claim that normally overrides other considerations. Today’s secular world values individual autonomy instead, and prefers the authority of claims such as “I want this” or “this is part of my identity as I define it.”

Furthermore, the "separate spheres" understanding of the authority of church and state has broken down, as the liberal state is now claiming authority in both spheres:

At one time it was possible to reconcile the two by saying that they dealt with different matters, the Church hierarchy with fundamental spiritual and moral principles and the state with worldly practicalities and standards of conduct generally accepted as a matter of vernacular natural law (otherwise known as common sense).

That view no longer works because of growing state absolutism resulting from the decline of transcendent religion and the sense of a natural moral order. All social institutions, including the family, are now viewed as state creations, so that determining what they should be in light of ultimate values such as equality and personal autonomy is considered a basic function of government. On such an understanding there is no room for the moral authority of the Church.

Modern liberalism sees the traditional Christian view as not only wrong but gravely so:

Secular society of course views things differently. From its standpoint the Church’s claims are not merely weak but outrageous. “This is right,” where “right” is presented as obligatory without regard to desires, chosen identities, or the needs of a public order that makes freedom and equality its supreme goods, is seen as an attempt to make the speaker’s outlook and preferences trump other people’s...Against that background secular society is coming decisively to view religion as a matter of private lifestyle and symbolism

What Kalb says next is very significant. He writes that unless Catholics are willing to acknowledge the fundamental differences, their point of view will either not make sense to a secular audience or else will be comprehended within the secular outlook:

Otherwise what we say will either be treated as incomprehensible or absorbed into the current secular outlook. A call for mutual love, for example, will be understood as a call for affirming and supporting the desires and self-defined identities of all people just as they are, subject only to the principle of mutual tolerance.

That was a very good example to give, because it is becoming so rife within the various churches. It is common now to hear Christians argue that the commitment to love one another means accepting whatever choices people make, i.e. accepting them however they wish to be as a gesture of inclusiveness, even if these choices run counter to scripture or longstanding church tradition. It is dissolving of the notion of moral good, apart, that is, from the good of unconditional acceptance and inclusion.

Kalb finishes by giving some suggestions for what Catholics might do at the present time. One of them is to live well:

it remains true that in a time of moral confusion living well is the best offense. People know that the current order of things doesn’t help them lead good lives, and if they see someone who has something better many of them will eventually want to know more about it. We should live in a way that makes that the natural turn for their thoughts to take.

I think that's good advice for traditionalists in general (though not the complete answer). If we become known as the portion of Westerners who best display the masculine virtues; who make good husbands and fathers; who are positive and courageous in their attitudes; who are magnanimous in the sense of rising above pettiness - then that helps to prepare the ground for converting young people in the future to our cause.

Pope Francis on globalisation

In a recent interview Pope Francis made the following criticism of globalisation:

The globalization that the Church thinks of does not look like a sphere in which every point is equidistant from the center and in which, therefore, the particularity of peoples is lost. It is, rather, a polyhedron, with its different facets, in which each nation keeps its own culture, language, religion, identity. The present “spherical” economic globalization, especially the financial, produces one thought, a weak thought. And the human person is no longer at its center but only money.

That's a welcome defence of the importance of particular relationships. The challenge for the Church is to follow through with this principle, by supporting the right of nations to apply border controls in order to maintain their own distinct existence.

The Pope on fidelity

In a recent post I took aim at Giles Fraser, an Anglican minister, who claimed that we are always morally responsible to those most other to us. Giles Fraser wrote:

...you know, constantly in Jesus' teaching there's stuff about the stranger, there's stuff about the other, there's stuff about the Good Samaritan, and our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us.

My response was that this can't be true as Christian morality recognises the importance of fidelity in relationships. In marriage, fidelity means that we remain turned toward our spouse, seeking to deepen a union with them, and that we accept the service we are called to in this relationship, a service that fulfils a significant aspect of who we are.

Much of our daily moral responsibility is oriented to our spouse and to our family, i.e. to those we are most close to and familiar with, rather than to persons who are most other to us.

This model of fidelity is to be found, in particular ways, in a series of relationships, e.g. between ourselves as individuals and God; between ourselves and our wider family or community (clan, tribe, ethny, nation); between God and church and so on.

Now, by one of those coincidences I published this argument on November 17th and the very next day Pope Francis was reported to have given a homily touching on the theme of fidelity. Unfortunately the Vatican hasn't published the full text of the homily, but various excerpts have been given in the press.

The theme of the homily was that we do not negotiate everything in a spirit of adolescent progressivism, in particular we do not negotiate fidelity. Pope Francis began with a reading from the Book of Maccabees in which many Jews agreed to abandon their traditions in order to curry favour with King Antiochus:

L’Osservatore Romano reported that the Pope preached:

“Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us; we cannot become isolated” or remain stuck in our old traditions. “Let us go and make a covenant with them, for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us.” The proposal so pleased them that some of the people eagerly went to see the king, to bargain with the king, to negotiate.

L’Osservatore Romano continued:

The Bishop of Rome likened their attitude to what he called the modern-day “spirit of adolescent progressivism” which seductively suggests that it is always right, when faced with any decision, to move on rather than remaining faithful to one's own traditions. “The people,” he said, “bargained with the king, they negotiated with the king. But they didn't negotiate habits … they negotiated fidelity to God, who is always faithful. And this is what we call apostasy; the prophets called it adultery. They were an adulterous people” who “negotiated something essential to their very being, i.e., their faithfulness to the Lord.”

Many people, he said, accepted the king's orders “which prescribed that all the people in his kingdom should be one: and every one should leave his own law.” However, he observed, it was not the “beautiful globalization” which is expressed in “the unity of all nations” who each preserve their own identity and traditions. No, he said, the passage describes the “globalization of hegemonic uniformity,” a uniformity of thought born of worldliness.

“Still today, the spirit of worldliness leads us to progressivism, to this uniformity of thought” … Negotiating one's fidelity to God is like negotiating one's identity, Pope Francis said.

In what ways does this support the argument I made against Giles Fraser?

The Pope's homily suggests the importance of fidelity as a moral concept within Christianity. For Pope Francis fidelity is important in upholding what is essential to our being and identity.

Fidelity has to do with our relationship to God, but it applies as well to our relationship with our larger ethnic or national communities. It is not always right, says Pope Francis, in a "spirit of adolescent progressivism" to "move on rather than remaining faithful to one's own traditions". It is important, in the Pope's view, that there be a "beautiful globalisation" in which there is a unity between nations who "each preserve their own identity and traditions" rather than a "globalization of hegemonic uniformity" in which we merge into sameness.

So is our moral responsibility always to the person more other to us, as Giles Fraser claims? Not according to this homily by Pope Francis, in which our moral responsibility is to practise fidelity - a faithfulness to God and to our own traditions and traditional communities, through which we uphold our identity and essential aspects of our being.

On fidelity

Giles Fraser is the Anglican minister who, in a recent BBC debate, claimed that Christianity means being always morally oriented to those who are most other to us:

...you know, constantly in Jesus' teaching there's stuff about the stranger, there's stuff about the other, there's stuff about the Good Samaritan, and our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us.

I want to sketch out an argument as to why Christianity can't be understood this way.

But first let me concede that our moral responsibility in Christianity does extend to the stranger. That is on the basis that as man is made in God's image, that to love God is to love our fellow man. And this is not only derived from the Bible, but can be argued for from natural law. We do share a common humanity, so we should help out a stranger in dire need on this basis.

However, to limit Christianity to this one principle is a prime example of "intellectuals' disease," in which moral positions are derived from a single principle or formulation.

Giles Fraser's single principle cannot explain a great deal of Biblical morality. Take, for instance, the issue of infidelity. There is no doubt that Christian marriages are supposed to be faithful. But why?

It could be answered, simply, that this has to do with sexual purity or that it is a matter of justice to one's spouse. Even if we leave it at that, we can see that our moral responsibility is not just to the stranger, but to the person closest to us, the one with whom we have become, in Christian terms, "one flesh".

But we can take this a little further. There is a post on marriage that has gone viral called "Marriage isn't for you" by Seth Adam Smith. The message of the post, in a nutshell, is that marriage is about selfless love. By selfless isn't meant an absence of self. It means being focused on others, in this case on your spouse, your children and your wider family. As Seth's father put it to him:

You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. "Marriage is about the person you married.”

The truth of this is that marriage is not passively sitting back and getting things from your spouse. It is an active process of service to spouse and family and, as part of this orientation, to drawing together in a relationship with your spouse, physically and emotionally, i.e. to truly live as "one flesh".

Seth and his bride

Infidelity, it seems to me, is not just sexual. You could have infidelity when a spouse still performs the basic social role of husband or wife, and does not commit adultery, but has turned away from their spouse and no longer seeks actively to draw together into a marital relationship.

For those who are married, this effort to draw together within a relationship through what we gift to our spouse will be a significant part of our day to day orientation in life. It is not a commitment to the stranger but to the person with whom we are seeking the closest union, within a sacrament that has made us one flesh. And fidelity within this relationship matters a great deal.

It is a similar thing when it comes to fidelity in our relationship to God. Fidelity here means that we are turned toward the relationship, seeking out God and gifting ourselves in service. It is about a deepening union rather than a seeking out of the stranger (which is why, I think, I get so cranky when the mass is oriented toward secular politics- it is supposed to be time to stop from our busy schedules to turn toward God.)

One final point. If faithfulness in our relationships is morally significant, this applies as well to the particular relationships we have beyond family. Whether these are to clan, tribe or nation, they draw from individuals the same concern to give of themselves in the relationship, and to nurture and protect what is loved. This is particularly true of communities that we are deeply embedded in through ties of ethnicity (of shared descent, history, culture, language etc.), as these are the ties that call on us the most. The loss of these communities is felt deeply, in part, because it takes away one of the spheres of life in which we are set most closely in relationship with others and most challenged to give of ourselves.

Liberal moderns are not big on fidelity (in the sense I have described). They seem to seek out infidelity whenever they can. It is a pity that some Christians have followed them in this, on the basis, as Giles Fraser put it, that our moral responsibility is always towards those most other to us.

I don't see how that can fit into a Christian understanding of marriage, nor of fidelity in relationships in general.