My father, who was an English professor, once published an article entitled, “Does Grammar Checkers Work?” He ran the article — with the title — through a grammar checker before he published it.

Time Magazine has just published an article bearing the title, "Are America's Best Days Behind Us"? There is an eerie similarity between this title and the title of my father's article. In both cases, the posing of the question is a symptom of the answer.

But, in truth, it must be conceded that the question about America is more important than the one about grammar. And what is most disturbing about it is that far too few people see that the concern about America is, at the core, a moral concern. The Time article alludes to all the usual things: competition with China and India, students’ mathematics scores, national debt, and so forth. The author then adds,

But this misses the broader point. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who has just written a book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, puts things in historical context: “For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps — competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.”

One must regret having to say it, but that more or less misses the point. “Killer apps” may be a clever metaphor, but it is also a telling one. My father in law, who was a veteran of World War II, used to talk about something he and his fellow veterans referred to as “moral fiber.” He talked about how, at one time, moral fiber was recognized as the indispensable ingredient for a serious soldier – or a serious citizen, for that matter. The description of this as an “app” has the ring of a grotesque metaphor.

None of the things mentioned above by the venerable Harvard historian appears to be conceived of as anything but a useful good — a bonum utile, as it was once termed–, as opposed to a noble good or a bonum honestum — something which is good in itself, in other words. Even the “rule of law” is indeed useful. But the obvious question is, “Useful for what?” To beat out China with our gross domestic product? To get more sources of diversion into our Ipods and Ipads?

We have forgotten the answer to this question. Even those who debate about particular points of morality seem often to fail to grasp well what is at stake. That is why such debates all too often degenerate into accusations about “your morality” versus mine.

The best philosophers, such as Plato, saw that there is a vast difference between being good at something and simply being good. The veterans my father in law knew were good at many things, but they too knew the difference between that and being good. They also knew that being good required work: not the kind of work that makes an “application,” but the kind of work that makes the man or the woman. But it will be impossible to understand what we mean by this “goodness,” if we fail to find its roots in something noble and worthy of our striving: something we do not make, but rather submit ourselves to.

Unfortunately, our civilization is nearing a crisis in its dilemma. On the one side is the still fashionable existentialism, which smiles condescendingly on the idea that there might be any source of our nobility in something better than ourselves – God, for example. It prefers the empty charm – the so-called “tragedy” – of our getting to make something from nothing; of “creating” our own values.

On the other side of the dilemma we find the reassertion of God’s sovereignty; but for lack of our willingness to think about that sovereignty in reasonable ways, through the rich heritage we had, we find instead, increasingly, a grotesque and violent representation of that sovereignty as all that remains to fill the void.

One of many delightful moments in the movie The Fugitive occurs when a colleague of fugitive Dr. Kimble confidently informs Federal Marshal Gerard and his assistant that they will not succeed in finding Kimble. When Gerard wonders what makes him so sure, the colleague replies, “He’s too smart for you.” Upon which the marshal and his assistant don quizzical looks and speak just two words: “We’re smart?” The words are uttered less as an assertion than a question; they express not arrogant self-assertion but good-natured, sociable, wisely moderate confidence. In this scene, as in others, Gerard turns out to be rather charming.

This article, by Ross Douthat of the New York Times, is perceptive in its own way, but maybe a little too generous in its willingness to concede that those with democratic leanings are “smart.” Douthat proposes to offer some corrections to the recent well publicized article by Angelo Codevilla, which described the polarization of contemporary American political life into an elite class and a country class. Douthat thinks that the demarcation between liberal and conservative views is not nearly so clear as Codevilla claims it is. The real difference between liberals and conservatives, according to Douthat, is the one that Codevilla identifies as more a false difference than a real one: namely that liberals are smarter than conservatives. To his credit, it must be acknowledged that Douthat doesn’t beat around the bush. He works hard to help even the most challenged among us to understand that the Democrats on the whole, and especially the ones surrounding Barack Obama, really are smarter than the rest of us.

The truth, though, is that this is a deeper matter than Douthat suggests. It is true enough that the “country class” does not, on the whole, shine when it comes to intellectual sophistication — though there are some very significant, if not entirely well known, exceptions. But neither, on the other hand, does the ruling class shine when it comes to being sensible about matters of common ordinary judgment, such as being faithful in marriage, spending within one’s limits, or respecting religious traditions and customs.

The seeds of this division in the political landscape have been planted and sown now for over a century. Their garden has been the schools and universities, and the first gardeners were second-rate philosophers such as John Dewey, themselves heirs of the so-called enlightenment. At bottom, therefore, this dispute is about academic intellectual culture and its role in contemporary American life. And accordingly, the mode of discourse appropriate to resolving this dispute is not primarily rhetorical or journalistic.

There are, however, some fundamental clarifications and distinctions which can serve as universal bases for discussion, even in the coffee shop or town hall. One important distinction, which Douthat notes at least in passing, is the distinction between wisdom and “raw intelligence.” Contemporary American culture holds the latter in very high regard, to the point of confusing it with the former. It doesn’t help that most contemporary intellectual currents tend to deny that human intelligence is perfectible by anything but itself. This is an essentially Marxist-Hegelian view, which in the end makes raw intelligence and wisdom identical in their non-being. This is the sort of issue that is really at stake, if one really intends to take intellectual matters seriously.

But maybe even some smarter Democrats will instinctively shy away from such ethereal questions. That brings me to a further point. The Tea Party, which Democrats take such joy in maligning, is not founded on intellectual sophistication; but it is founded on something which we would all, if we understood it better, regard as the absolutely indispensable condition for any intellectual progress whatsoever. I am referring to common, ordinary conceptions: what the Greeks called axiomata, and later Latin scholars called dignitates. The names mean just what they suggest: that there are things which deserve to be recognized immediately on their own account. They are axiomatic not because they can be proven, but because they bear their own evidence within themselves without any need for proof. Many of them are the sorts of things about which Aristotle famously observed that they neither are nor can be imparted by argument, but only, if at all, by appropriate discipline.

Intellectual culture in the late middle ages became corrupt partly because of gross oversimplifications about what all this means. But it was never wrong to recognize that one must start somewhere, that there is a first vague contact with reality without which all the raw intelligence in the world gets us nowhere. Members of the Tea Party, not unlike our forbears in the early colonies, are indeed not burdened with what some people proudly refer to as “nuances.” Tea Partiers recognize the simpler and more fundamental things, the axiomata. For all the scorn that has been and probably will continue to be heaped on the Tea Party, the truth is that its members suffer from no greater evil than an unshakable awareness of first things. If more sophisticated “intelligent” people have talked themselves out of that awareness, they have no one to blame but themselves, and in the end their “raw intelligence” will come to naught. The turtle will defeat the hare.

At the end of the day, what must be understood is that the intellectual culture of the West is not Intellectual Culture itself. Its contours could have been very different from what they are. And while our more modern intellectual culture has, to be sure, many facets, there is one very large rotten pillar resting beneath it. That pillar is the rejection of God, which grew up in the classical modern thought of Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Rousseau, Fuerbach, and others. More elaborately: the view in question is that “God” is a hypothesis, useful for personal edification, quieting the masses, or perhaps mere psychological sedation, but not consistent with the new science, with the demands of reason, which has learned over the centuries how to be coldly positivist, open to alternatives, and wary about any connection between the concepts of “real” and “good.”

This view goes hand in hand with an immature and now outdated, but still remarkably influential, understanding of the role of reason in human life, and a consequently truncated view of our understanding of what reason enables us to do. The immature view treats reason as if it were some strange disembodied, depersonalized substance, separate from the I who owns it; it’s signature expression (though often apparently inadvertent) at one time was, “the mind knows….” In this understanding of reason, the forum of rational activity (at least when we are being “scientific,” which is what we must aspire to) must absolutely exclude intuitions about the the good, the honorable, the beautiful, or about metaphysical causality. Though this account of reason is far from axiomatic, many now treat it as axiomatic. It has led to an almost universal misconception concerning the role of faith in human life (not just religious faith, but any faith; even, for example, the faith you have in your mother when she says that she is your mother) which is grotesque at best, yet scarcely any longer recognized as grotesque. And so it was only to be expected that later such a disemboweled reason would come to be despised, and in its place installed a caricaturish sort of intelligence which never ceases to be raw, because we like it that way. And so now we witness this worship of raw intelligence, along with a declining scientism which is nothing but a peculiar vestige of the classical modern rationalism.

The irony is that this intellectual culture is only self-evident to its contemporary adherents in the way that familiar things are always self-evident — which is to say that it is not self-evident at all; which is to say that what we have been describing as the “ruling,” or “elite” class suffers from the very malady which it scornfully attributes to the country class: the malady, namely, of taking the familiar for the obvious. The country class at least bears the distinctive honor of remaining more or less familiar with real things, instead of the peculiar rational constructs of a discredited “enlightenment,” or its even stranger offspring. Is a return to reality, perceived on a relatively naive level, enough? Probably not. But at least it’s a start.

That’s more that can be said for the smart people.

… is that they are bringing real leaders out of the shadows.

For example, listen to this.

In an earlier post I described how faith is generically like opinion, because it involves both reason and will. Faith and opinion are both perfectly compatible with reasonableness, but the reasons for holding something by opinion or faith are formally different from the reasons on account of which we can be said to know something. The former are reasons for a choice — because we choose to hold what we hold by faith or opinion –, whereas the latter are reasons by which we simply see something.

The scientism which grew up in the last few centuries, but which is now recognized by many to have been misguided, was essentially the result of an excessive faith in our power to know, along with a concomitant (and self-contradictory) disdain for faith and opinion. One of my readers suggested that I was foolish to say that we could reasonably hold anything that we didn’t simply know, as if it were possible to entirely dispense with faith and opinion. This was surely a naive suggestion (an opinion), but it was, quite essentially, just what the new atheist scientism is really based on, if it is based on anything. What the new atheism fails to see, before all else, is that the vast bulk of human thought is not, in fact, in the realm of knowing, but rather in the realm of opinion and faith. And there is nothing wrong with this; it is simply the nature of human beings to live by opinion and faith. What would be (and often is) wrong, evidently, is to fail to make our faith and opinions be adequately guided by both reason and good will.

But the far deeper truth about this demands that we go further, by observing not only what opinion and faith have in common as against knowledge, but also how they are different. It is not by accident that English has two different words, faith and opinion. So how are they different?

What is perhaps most obvious is that faith entails a connection with other persons, while opinion need not have any such connection. One can have the opinion that digging a well right here will be successful or not; but this is not faith, unless it involves submitting to someone else’s judgment. Faith is thus commonly associated with trust, whereas opinion may be entirely independent of, or even contrary to, what anyone else proposes.

The Cartesian revolution was, before all else, a crisis of faith. Descartes’ entire philosophy was motivated by a desire to withhold trust in others, on the ground that such trust was apt to be misleading. No one can reasonably doubt that trusting others sometimes does cause us to be misled. But Descartes’ unexamined presumption was that one could do better by dispensing with such trust entirely. One of the results of this was that philosophy — intellectual life — had to begin anew every time anyone proposed to himself to undertake it. Philosophy and intellectual life thereby came to be seen as radically solitary activities; instead of “philosophy,” there could now be no more than a lame creature described as “my philosophy” and “your philosophy.”

What this really means is that truth was no longer understood as a common good. This was the Machiavellian-Hobbesean view of human nature transported into the realm of intellectual pursuit. In the latter view, to trust another can never be understood as anything but a calculated risk, and to regard it as anything else is thought to be, by definition, gullibility. Often one does not recognize that this involves a profoundly false redefinition of human nature. There is, obviously, such a thing as gullibility; but the view that mistrust is the normal and virtuous stance vis-à-vis other persons is a view pregnant with dire consequences. Among other things, it entails treating every fellow person as no more than a circumstance for our choices. The world thus becomes an absolutely lonely place, in the deepest imaginable sense.

There is a deep interior contradiction within the new atheist scientism, precisely with regard to its attitude to this question of the interpersonal nature of faith. The new atheism inherited — indeed is defined by — the Cartesian attitude of mistrust, as its articulated philosophical attitude. But the contradiction, lost upon the adherents of this view, consists in the fact that contemporary science is replete with acts of faith too.

Many defenders of religious faith have pointed out that both contemporary science, as well as the attitude of scientism, require their own faith. But more often than not this is made into an ad hominem argument pointed in the wrong direction; as if the authors of the argument wanted to say, “Why blame us for our faith when you have yours too?” But there is a deeper truth which this argument entirely misses.

The science of the last few centuries has, by all accounts, grown by astonishing leaps and bounds. From the wonderful mysteries of the quantum structure of the atom, to the vast expanses of space-time, to the vast history of cosmic evolution, we now know about a world which was simply lost upon our ancestors.

But we must focus our attention on this phrase, “We now know.” In what sense do we now know? Many an adherent of religious faith might be quick to point out that we don’t know — for as I just observed above, it is really faith by which “we” claim to know the many things science tells us. The scientist who actually uses the Hubble telescope may (perhaps) claim to know, but the rest of us believe.

Is it simply wrong, then, to say, “We know?” It will surely be wrong it we adopt the Cartesian attitude of fundamental mistrust. But our spontaneous and natural habits of discourse (expressed in the phrase “we now know”) belie this false attitude. The fundamental mistrust of Cartesianism is based on the assumption that truth cannot be an interpersonal common good, and that therefore I cannot share the knowledge you possess, by a kind of participation through a natural act of faith which one person makes in another. Such acts of faith form the great bulk of the furnishings of our minds and hearts; without them, life would be heartless and intellectually sterile. (It was Pascal who was perhaps first to forcefully articulate this in response to the devastation being wrought by the Cartesian revolution; but Pascal’s articulation is often mistaken for poetic wishful thinking, and not seen as the deep intellectual meditation which it really is.)

We rightly, and spontaneously, reject the Cartesian attitude of fundamental mistrust in matters of science. It is only when we try to philosophically articulate our view about truth itself that some of us continue to fall back on the old Cartesianism. But our more natural and spontaneous inclination gives the lie to our bad philosophical habits. It is only because these old philosophical habits remain inadequately examined that some of us — most notably the naive adherents to contemporary scientific atheism — continue to practice them.

[To be continued....]

Here are some refreshing words to recall, after the idiocy emerging lately from Congress and the White House. In view of the latter, the admonitions at the end of this talk were clearly prescient and wise.

~~~~~~~~~

Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address to the Nation

Oval Office
January 11, 1989

This is the 34th time I’ll speak to you from the Oval Office and the last. We’ve been together eight years now, and soon it’ll be time for me to go. But before I do, I wanted to share some thoughts, some of which I’ve been saving for a long time.

It’s been the honor of my life to be your president. So many of you have written the past few weeks to say thanks, but I could say as much to you. Nancy and I are grateful for the opportunity you gave us to serve.

One of the things about the presidency is that you’re always somewhat apart. You spend a lot of time going by too fast in a car someone else is driving, and seeing the people through tinted glass–the parents holding up a child, and the wave you saw too late and couldn’t return. And so many times I wanted to stop and reach out from behind the glass, and connect. Well, maybe I can do a little of that tonight.

People ask how I feel about leaving. And the fact is, “parting is such sweet sorrow.” The sweet part is California, and the ranch and freedom. The sorrow–the goodbyes, of course, and leaving this beautiful place.

You know, down the hall and up the stairs from this office is the part of the White House where the president and his family live. There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning. The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that’s the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.

I’ve been thinking a bit at that window. I’ve been reflecting on what the past eight years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one–a small story about a big ship, and a refugee and a sailor. It was back in the early ’80s, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck and stood up and called out to him. He yelled, “Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.”

A small moment with a big meaning, a moment the sailor, who wrote it in a letter, couldn’t get out of his mind. And when I saw it, neither could I. Because that’s what it was to be an American in the 1980s. We stood, again, for freedom. I know we always have, but in the past few years the world again, and in a way, we ourselves rediscovered it.

It’s been quite a journey this decade, and we held together through some stormy seas. And at the end, together, we are reaching our destination.

The fact is, from Grenada to the Washington and Moscow summits, from the recession of ’81 to ’82, to the expansion that began in late ’82 and continues to this day, we’ve made a difference. The way I see it, there were two great triumphs, two things that I’m proudest of. One is the economic recovery, in which the people of America created–and filled–19 million new jobs. The other is the recovery of our morale. America is respected again in the world and looked to for leadership.

Something that happened to me a few years ago reflects some of this. It was back in 1981, and I was attending my first big economic summit, which was held that year in Canada. The meeting place rotates among the member countries. The opening meeting was a formal dinner for the heads of government of the seven industrialized nations. Now, I sat there like the new kid in school and listened, and it was all Francois this and Helmut that. They dropped titles and spoke to one another on a first-name basis. Well, at one point I sort of leaned in and said, “My name’s Ron.” Well, in that same year, we began the actions we felt would ignite an economic comeback–cut taxes and regulation, started to cut spending. And soon the recovery began.

Two years later another economic summit, with pretty much the same cast. At the big opening meeting we all got together, and all of a sudden, just for a moment, I saw that everyone was just sitting there looking at me. And one of them broke the silence. “Tell us about the American miracle,” he said.

Well, back in 1980, when I was running for president, it was all so different. Some pundits said our programs would result in catastrophe. Our views on foreign affairs would cause war. Our plans for the economy would cause inflation to soar and bring about economic collapse. I even remember one highly respected economist saying, back in 1982, that “the engines of economic growth have shut down here, and they’re likely to stay that way for years to come.” Well, he and the other opinion leaders were wrong. The fact is, what they called “radical” was really “right.” What they called “dangerous” was just “desperately needed.”

And in all of that time I won a nickname, “The Great Communicator.” But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation–from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I’ll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.

Common sense told us that when you put a big tax on something, the people will produce less of it. So, we cut the people’s tax rates, and the people produced more than ever before. The economy bloomed like a plant that had been cut back and could now grow quicker and stronger. Our economic program brought about the longest peacetime expansion in our history: real family income up, the poverty rate down, entrepreneurship booming, and an explosion in research and new technology. We’re exporting more than ever because American industry became more competitive and at the same time, we summoned the national will to knock down protectionist walls abroad instead of erecting them at home. Common sense also told us that to preserve the peace, we’d have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons–and hope for even more progress is bright–but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease. The Persian Gulf is no longer a war zone. The Soviets are leaving Afghanistan. The Vietnamese are preparing to pull out of Cambodia, and an American-mediated accord will soon send 50,000 Cuban troops home from Angola.

The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.

When you’ve got to the point when you can celebrate the anniversaries of your 39th birthday, you can sit back sometimes, review your life, and see it flowing before you. For me there was a fork in the river, and it was right in the middle of my life. I never meant to go into politics. It wasn’t my intention when I was young. But I was raised to believe you had to pay your way for the blessings bestowed on you. I was happy with my career in the entertainment world, but I ultimately went into politics because I wanted to protect something precious.

Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: “We the people.” “We the people” tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. “We the people” are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which “We the people” tell the government what it is allowed to do. “We the people” are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do these past eight years.

But back in the 1960s, when I began, it seemed to me that we’d begun reversing the order of things–that through more and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the government was taking more of our money, more of our options, and more of our freedom. I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, “Stop.” I was a citizen politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do.

I think we have stopped a lot of what needed stopping. And I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

Nothing is less free than pure communism, and yet we have, the past few years, forged a satisfying new closeness with the Soviet Union. I’ve been asked if this isn’t a gamble, and my answer is no because we’re basing our actions not on words but deeds. The detente of the 1970s was based not on actions but promises. They’d promise to treat their own people and the people of the world better. But the gulag was still the gulag, and the state was still expansionist, and they still waged proxy wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Well, this time, so far, it’s different. President Gorbachev has brought about some internal democratic reforms and begun the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has also freed prisoners whose names I’ve given him every time we’ve met.

But life has a way of reminding you of big things through small incidents. Once, during the heady days of the Moscow summit, Nancy and I decided to break off from the entourage one afternoon to visit the shops on Arbat Street–that’s a little street just off Moscow’s main shopping area. Even though our visit was a surprise, every Russian there immediately recognized us and called out our names and reached for our hands. We were just about swept away by the warmth. You could almost feel the possibilities in all that joy. But within seconds, a KGB detail pushed their way toward us and began pushing and shoving the people in the crowd. It was an interesting moment. It reminded me that while the man on the street in the Soviet Union yearns for peace, the government is Communist. And those who run it are Communists, and that means we and they view such issues as freedom and human rights very differently.

We must keep up our guard, but we must also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate tension and mistrust. My view is that President Gorbachev is different from previous Soviet leaders. I think he knows some of the things wrong with his society and is trying to fix them. We wish him well. And we’ll continue to work to make sure that the Soviet Union that eventually emerges from this process is a less threatening one. What it all boils down to is this. I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don’t, at first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It’s still trust but verify. It’s still play, but cut the cards. It’s still watch closely. And don’t be afraid to see what you see.

I’ve been asked if I have any regrets. Well, I do. The deficit is one. I’ve been talking a great deal about that lately, but tonight isn’t for arguments. And I’m going to hold my tongue. But an observation: I’ve had my share of victories in the Congress, but what few people noticed is that I never won anything you didn’t win for me. They never saw my troops, they never saw Reagan’s regiments, the American people. You won every battle with every call you made and letter you wrote demanding action. Well, action is still needed. If we’re to finish the job, Reagan’s regiments will have to become the Bush brigades. Soon he’ll be the chief, and he’ll need you every bit as much as I did. Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-’60s

But now, we’re about to enter the ’90s, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom–freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection.

So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important: Why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing of her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ‘em know and nail ‘em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

And that’s about all I have to say tonight. Except for one thng. The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

We’ve done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren’t just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger. We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.

And so, good-bye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

Anyone who really wants to understand the health care bill should watch this — both parts. Then after that, watch this.

The United States of America used to be thought of as a beacon of freedom, the “great experiment” of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Most Americans still profess their pride in being part of that great experiment.

What about you, dear members of Congress? Do you profess that also? Or do you prefer the methods of ancient tyrannies?

Why is the so-called “health care” bill now being underhandedly forced through the Senate? Why is there talk of passing it on Christmas Eve, when the least attention might be paid to what is happening? Why does Senator Reid seem to prefer to hide one of the most life-changing bills ever proposed in Congress? Why do democrats prefer ignorance over knowledge of what the health care bill is really about? Why all the surreptitiousness?

When slavery was a matter for contention among Americans, Abraham Lincoln had the wisdom to see that the maintaining of lawfulness was imperative; for whatever the merit of arguments for or against slavery, he saw that no side would win if lawfulness itself came to be compromised. You, dear members of Congress, have the opportunity now to exercise similar wisdom, not with respect to lawfulness, but with respect to the very concept of government of a free people.

Tyrannical and underhanded tactics are the very antithesis of such government. They are the antithesis of a thoughtful and free national conversation about such important issues as abortion. This will be especially true if American citizens, the majority of whom in conscience oppose abortion and similar measures deceitfully placed under the category of “health,” are forced to support them.

Do what is right. Forcing Americans to do something that they oppose in conscience is not right. Forcing socialism on the American people is not the “change” that they want. If the truth were told, everyone would openly acknowledge that the fundamental issues here are not economic — despite the monumental price tag attached to this bill. What we are now witnessing is an experimentum crucis concerning our very conception of self-government.

It is not, one must suspect, as easy as many people think to separate ancient cosmology from what it called the “perennial philosophy.” The unfortunate thing, though, is that many “perennial philosophers” aren’t too interested in even trying to separate them. They are quite content with the good of fictional verisimilitude. It does not occur to them that the full good of traditional philosophy might never be found if it is not seen in the context of the historical entity called the real world.

If my theses concerning the truth about local motion and “force” are correct, then we must say several important things by way of corollary.

The primacy of “local motion” may remain intact, but it is not the “act of the potential” that everyone imagines. I do not say that it is no act of the potential; but we can have a much richer and more concretized notion of what this means, now, if we only care to look into it. Doing so will also raise many new questions. We will see, if we look into it, that becoming is not the extrinsic feature of reality which it must have inevitably seemed to be from an ancient perspective (even after the Aristotelian discovery of potential as a principle). Despite the interest the ancients had in seeing a universal cosmic order, local becoming could not, for them, be adequately seen in its true relation to substantial becoming. Time inevitably had to have, in the Aristotelian tradition, a semi-geometrical, and consequently extrinsic, aspect.

The history of the universe is coming to be seen as one of its essential features. It is far from being a merely accidental feature. The motion spoken of in Aquinas’s First Way ought to be understood in this way, rather than in the old way where it was conceived of as a quasi-geometrical, and quasi-eternal, feature of the world.

The notion that the inanimate world is a “merely passive” world is also no longer tenable. There is even more reason now than there was in the past to understand life as interiority, rather than as mere activity (as opposed to passivity). All levels of being take part in activity, much more than the ancients could see. Interiority itself is therefore a greater perfection than could before have been conceived.

Hamlet, in a state of agitation, speaks of “words, words, words” when asked what he is reading. We have arrived at a world where Hamlet’s agitation might well be ours: a world where “words” are overused and abused. The preciousness of silence is often forgotten. This is (at least one reason) why this blog tries to be sparing in words.

But there are things I must write about. The response I have had in the last couple of years to my work on the concept of force has been matter for comedy. With a few exceptions, my work has simply met with indifference or skepticism. A few have said or implied that I really don’t understand anything, or that I should “consult” with someone who understands physics. Underlying their judgment has been the presumption, taken as self-evident, that I wanted to publish my work merely for the sake of publishing, or to get a name for myself.

I have spent too long being preoccupied with this. A world is waiting to be discovered and articulated. Its articulation will constitute a rebirth in the philosophy of science, and perhaps a consequent rebirth in philosophy itself. The exploration of what a renaissance could look like in science, once the old paradigm is gone, is begging to be undertaken. I will do my tiny part, and hope others will contribute.

I wrote before that the implications of a deeper understanding of where “mechanistic” science came from could be immense. What implications am I talking about? Let me start by proposing one point which might illustrate the power of paradigms.

Where did the Hobbesean – Machiavellian politics come from? No doubt it originated, in significant part, from properly political experience, and interpretations to which that experience gave rise. But that experience could not have been interpreted in the way it was if it were not for a more universal postulate: the postulate that there is such a thing as “force” understood not only as a political reality, but as a principle of politics and ethics. But it became a physical principle (articulated to various degrees at various times) before it became a political or ethical principle. If the former had not happened, the latter very likely would not have happened either. The difference that might have made is so vast that it is hard to conceived.

We have now built an entire civilization on the separation of final causes from efficient causes. Many noble souls still hope that the good will still prevail, and they act accordingly. But if one assumes that the good is brought about as an epiphenomenon from agencies which are at bottom blind, tyranny and not freedom will inevitably be the result. We see this in many different ways, in places ranging from the psychological to the ethical to the political.

Christmas Eve, 2008

Dear Mr. Obama,

In a speech before Planned Parenthood in 1997, you suggested that the “culture war” is a worn out debate  (“so nineties,” as you put it) that America needs to put to rest for once and for all. And you said that you would help to make that happen by signing the Freedom of Choice Act as one of your first acts as president.

But the premise of your thought is profoundly mistaken. It is imperative that you understand this, lest by signing FOCA you accomplish the very opposite of what you hope to accomplish.

To explain what I mean, I have to address something else you said in your speech to Planned Parenthood. You referred a number of times to “ideology” in that speech, and you suggested that ideology is the problem. By “ideology” you seem to mean ideas advanced for the sake of selfish ends, to the detriment of society. You apparently take the battle against abortion as the quintessential ideological battle, as thus understood.

But in the final analysis, none of this will wash; it’s far too facile and presumptive. Not that there is no such thing as ideology. Surely you are right that ideology is a huge problem — perhaps even the problem. But the real question is what to do about it. We won’t know what to do about it if we don’t understand it.

What is ideology, and what is the solution to ideology? Everyone may agree on this much: ideology is ideas proposed in a willful, self-centered, unjust manner, ideas proposed to the detriment of society. But there is something more fundamental than this, which is the real crux of the issue: Ideology is essentially dishonest, because it is a subordination of the pursuit of truth to ulterior, superficial, and often base motives. And so one must ask: is the solution to get rid of ideas, to forget about finding out what is true? Should we, for instance, not care what the truth is about when human life begins? Should we resort to verbal tricks to talk about that, with the implication that we are too modest to have positions on the things that matter most in human life? Is this the only real alternative to the challenge of learning the truth on the one side, versus self-interest masquerading as truth-telling on the other? Or is the real solution not rather to get beyond the selfish and superficial motivations, both personal and societal, that turn the pursuit of truth into ideological manipulation?

Obviously, everything turns on what one thinks of ideas themselves. That, in turn, is intimately connected with what one makes of of the phenomenon called humanity. And this is just what the fight over abortion is about.

There is more here to write about than I can manage now. My children — dear children, fortunate to be born and not destroyed — are clamoring to celebrate the Christ-child, not as a myth or a political ploy, but as the deepest of realities, and the deepest of mysteries too.

Some ideas are expressions of the deepest of realities. Some are, indeed, genuine attempts to discern the deepest realities, which for all that prove to be false. The great idea called tolerance is about the discovery that human beings need to give each other room to be mistaken in their yearning for the truth — not so that we can go back to being selfish, but so that we can submit to the truth in genuine freedom. This is a responsibility of both individuals and societies. The most important personal ethical decisions, as well as the most important societal customs and laws, are in the final analysis about submitting ourselves to the truth not ideologically (which after all is no submission to truth) but with the best of our power of discernment. This requires humility — not the false modesty which pretends to be able to dispense with all judgment.And an extreme disposition to impose abortion on a whole society bears the earmarks not of any such humility, but of hubris. Forcefully keeping important ideas, religious ones especially, out of the public forum is not tolerance, but the corruption of tolerance.

And so for now there is only time to say this: we agree about ideology. We have to get beyond that. But you must understand that signing FOCA won’t help with that. It won’t end the culture war. It won’t end the culture war because some ideas are much more than political ploys or personal selfish agendas. If ideas weren’t so important, ideology wouldn’t be such a problem either.

Flying directly in the face of the right to seek out, nourish, and cherish the truth won’t end any culture war. What it will do is start one … in earnest, in a manner not yet seen. In the name of Peace, let us avoid that.

With a heartfelt prayer for you, on this Most Holy Eve.

My apologies to any readers who have patiently been waiting for me to carry through with my intention to write about the question of theism versus atheism. Today, at last, I shall try to make a start at this. As I said before, this is a long-term project. The current rise in popularity of atheism is the result of many misunderstandings, and they won’t be cleared up in a day.

Let me start with some fundamental misunderstandings about what faith and religion are. Today many presume, incorrectly, that religion and God are essentially and exclusively matters of faith. When this is compounded with the common presumption that faith is an irrational act, an act of pure emotion as opposed to reason, it can hardly be surprising when many conclude that atheism is the better alternative. So let me begin by briefly considering each of these assumptions in turn.

First: is affirming God’s existence essentially and exclusively a matter of faith? Obviously, one could beg the question about this, and hold that it must be because God is a fiction, and fictions can only adhered to by an act of faith. But then this could hardly be an argument for denying God’s existence, since it would be presuming what it intends to prove.

The beings of our experience are full of contingency. One day my friend is alive and well, and the next day he is dead and gone, from circumstances no one could foresee. One day we feel as if all is well, and the next day our world is shattered by acts of terror, or by illness, or by the destruction of an economic order which no one thought would be destroyed.

We could give a thousand examples of this sort of thing. On reflection, we realize that there was never any ground for thinking, in any of them, that what we took to be permanently enduring really was so. Indeed, on more careful and deep philosophical reflection, we can come to realize a very remarkable truth: There can be no such thing as a perishable being that exists forever. This proposition is not subject to revision upon further examination; it is an absolutely necessary truth, like the truth that 2 + 2 = 4. Being forever is a category which simply cannot be realized one day after the next; it will only be realized, if at all, through necessity, a necessity which is present either right now or not at all. Just as with 2 + 2 = 4, these are propositions which one can fail to understand, but one cannot fail to affirm them once they are understood.

A brief interlude: When thinking about this, I am always reminded of a great learning moment which took place in my childhood. It happened one day when I was reading about logical puzzles, and came across the question, “What happens when an immovable object encounters an irresistible force?” After I and my friends grappled with this question for a while, I took it home and posed it to my father. My father was no fool. But he looked at me as if I was acting like one, and said, in reply, “Well, obviously that’s impossible, isn’t it?”

What I understood at that moment is that our words refer to intelligible realities, upon which there follow consequences. If we fail to grasp this, we deprive ourselves of the wherewithal to judge anything. And I do mean anything. Perhaps some reader will want to suggest to me that the meanings of our words are up to us, so that logical consistency has no connection with real being. But such a claim will fall under the category of anything; it is a judgment about reality which cannot be made, once granted the very hypothesis it supposes. Or, if the judgment is made, it can have no significance, again by that same hypothesis.

Unfortunately, the doctrine of nominalism is everywhere today, and it is one of the most fundamental, but also thoroughly rotten, underpinnings of the contemporary atheism. I will say more about it in a future post.

For now let me go back to where I was. Once we undersand that what is contingent must pass away, the question forces itself upon us: why does anything at all exist? If the sum total of what exists is contingent, then there can be no accounting for the existence of anything. Or, to say it another way, there must be something whose being is not contingent at all, some being for which “to be or not to be” are not possible alternatives. Only on the basis of such a being can we answer the famous question, “Why is there something and not nothing?” This non-contingent being must be one which does not receive its being, but which has being from itself. This is the very being which God refers to himself as in both the Old and New Testaments: I Am Who Am. And Before Abraham was, I Am.

But note well, dear reader, that I have not used Scripture to argue to God’s existence. What I have done is argue from what reason can know, that there must be a God. And this is certainly not the only argument for showing that God exists. In future posts I shall suggest some others. And so the existence of God is not essentially a matter of faith. Neither indeed is religion the same thing as faith. Religion is natural, before it ever comes to be a matter of faith.

But it would be a mistake to infer that I mean to suggest that faith itself is not natural. Contemporary atheism rests on the largely unexamined assumptions that religion and faith are inherently and by definition outside the realm of what is either reasonable or natural. I shall say more about why these assumptions are false in my next post, beginning with what faith is.

Undecided voters should read this before tomorrow’s election, especially if they care about Christianity or the family.