The Revenge of Conscience

Politics and the Fall of Man

Budziszewski

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498276597
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Describing the political effects of Original Sin, Professor Budziszewski shows how man's suppression of his knowledge of right and wrong corrupts his conscience and accelerates social collapse. The depraved conscience grasps at the illusion of "moral neutrality," the absurd notion that men live together without a shared understanding of how things are. After evaluating the political devices, including the American Constitution, by which men have tried in the past to work around the effects of Original Sin, Dr. Budziszewski elucidates the pitfalls of contemporary communitarianism, liberalism, and conservatism.

Chapter 1

The Fallen City

(apologion)

"Laws politic, ordained for external order and regiment among men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast, they do accordingly provide notwithstanding so to frame his outward actions, that they be no hindrance unto the common good for which societies are instituted: unless they do this, they are not perfect. It resteth therefore that we consider how nature findeth out such laws of government as serve to direct even nature depraved to a right end." -- Richard Hooker

"It is, therefore, a just political maxim that every man must be supposed a knave, though at the same time it appears somewhat strange that a maxim should be true in politics which is false in fact." -- David Hume

*** * ***

This book is a Christian reflection on the theme of politics and original sin. Simply put, I want to talk about what it means to our common life that we are "fallen." Fallenness is a paradox: we are neither simply good nor simply bad, but created good and broken. We are not a sheer ugliness, nothing so plain, but a beauty ruined.

Numerous objections are raised to such books, and I have heard most of them. The bluntest is that anyone who speaks of politics must impersonate an atheist. This complaint first reached me as a new-minted scholar, just escaped from atheism myself, when a reviewer recommended against the publication of one of my early efforts on grounds that "God does not belong in political theory." Ironically, he liked the book, but objected on principle to the mention of God. There is no point trying to reason with such people; this one went on to blame me, more or less, for the massacre of the Huguenots in 1572. Well, I have forgiven him, but he still interests me. If I am to blame for the religious butcheries of the sixteenth century, is he to blame for the secular savageries of the twentieth? I see your thousand Frenchmen; I raise you a million Chinese.

Of course the demand to impersonate atheists is not confined to the humane studies; scientists suffer it too. Indeed, biologist Richard Lewontin of Harvard proposes more than impersonation.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.^2*

The significance of such a remarkable confession is that we have been using the name "fundamentalist" for the wrong people. These days it is the theists who want to follow the evidence, and the materialists who want to ignore it.

But let us leave the sciences and return to the study of man. A more thoughtful objection to a book like this, worth lengthier examination, comes from a colleague who worries about the cacophony of voices in the modern world. He says there are too many religions, too many philosophies, too many sacred texts. We are in a new and unprecedented intellectual condition, he tells me -- a Pluralism. Understand that he is not a relativist; it would be impossible to rate too highly the persistence with which my friend seeks absolute values in this Babel. My disagreement begins with his description of the Babel as new. After all, the Tower of Babel is a very ancient tale, and just as many voices, sects, and doctrines quarrelled in premodern times as today. Nor were the thinkers of those times deaf to all the racket. Augustine contended with Gnostics, Platonists, Jews, Stoics, and Epicureans, among others. Maimonides wrote a Guide for the Perplexed. Thomas Aquinas cast his Summa Theologica in the form of disputed questions. Babel, I suggest, is not a modern revolution, but the enduring condition of the fallen human race.

Even so there is something new in the manner in which my friend and other moderns respond to Babel. It is not surprising that some thinkers deny absolute values; in one form or another, relativists, sophists, and skeptics have been with us from the beginning. Nor is it strange that others affirm them; in most eras the relativists, sophists, and skeptics have been in the minority. The novelty lies the way in which moderns affirm them when they do. Let me contrast their way, which my friend and most scholars call Pluralist, with an older way, which I will call Classical.

All those who practice the Classical way of affirming absolute values have two things in common. If you will pardon the coinages, they are all apologetical, and they are all noetic. By calling them apologetical, after the Greek word for a speech in defense, I mean that each stakes a claim and defends it. Each makes some one voice in the Babel his own, then takes on his competitors by arguing the issues on their merits. The Epicurean tells you why he thinks pleasure the sovereign good; the Christian tells you why he thinks Jesus the risen son of God; the Gnostic tells you why he thinks evil coeval with good. And by calling them noetic, after the Greek word for knowledge or understanding, I mean that their arguments appeal to shared knowledge rather than shared ignorance. Aristotle begins every ethical discussion with what almost all men in almost all times and places have believed. St. Paul, who quotes poets to pagans, says that God has not left Himself without a witness even among the nations; He has written His law on the heart. Thomas Aquinas holds that there are certain moral principles we can't not know -- principles that do not have to be proven because they are what everything is proven from. C.S. Lewis dares his readers to "Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud for double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five." Even Wittgenstein nods in the noetic direction when he calls philosophy an "assembling of reminders" rather than a discovering of things that have never been noticed before.

Notice that because a Classical affirmer is noetic, he does not take the Babel around him quite at face value. He will say that if I seem completely ignorant of a basic moral precept, the reason is less likely to be that I really don not know it, than that I don not want to know it and am holding my guilty knowledge down. Moreover, the Classical affirmer will regard an age like our own, in which even the most basic moral precepts are widely and increasingly denied, as exceptional even for this broken world. Before too long, any culture in deep moral denial must either come to its senses or collapse, for the consequences of denying first principles are cumulative and inescapable.

By contrast with the Classical way of affirming absolute values, the Pluralist way is anoetic and anapologetical. Pluralists are anoetic because they do take the Babel around them at face value. Their arguments appeal to shared ignorance rather than shared knowledge. So far as we know, they say, every religion and every philosophy is equally in the dark and equally in the light. Although Pluralists may well agree that our age is exceptional rather than typical, they see this not as an omen of corruption but as a portent of an impending forward leap -- a sign that our old philosophies have exhausted themselves and we need to try something new. What is the something new? This is where being anapologetical comes in. The Pluralist denies the need to make one voice in the Babel his own; he refuses to stake out a position, then argue its claims on their merits. By adopting a posture of neutrality among competing goals and aspirations, of equal concern and respect for them all (that becomes one of his absolutes), he tries to escape the futility of interminable apologetics and carve out a new moral sphere in which people of every point of view can get along: sodomists with Socialists, pickpockets with Platonists, hedonists with Hassidim.

This is a serious enterprise, and we ought to treat it as such. In the meantime notice its implications. In his own way, the Pluralist too thinks "God does not belong in political theory." He does not object to Christianity as a mistaken point of view; disputing its claims would be too crude. Rather he objects to it as a point of view -- just one more of the pullulating things, down there among the Platonists and pickpockets. Pluralism floats chastely above them, out-topping knowledge by the sheer force of nescience. "Others abide thy question; I am free."

In fact Pluralism does not float above them, but only seems to. Is there a way to have equal concern and respect for the views of both the rapist and the woman he wants to rape? Of course not. Either he gets his way, or she gets hers. Admitting this, some Pluralists try to defend the ideal of equal respect as merely a starting rather than an ending point. For example they say that the rapist may be thwarted because he has already broken the symmetry: she respects his plans, but he does not respect hers. Alas, this doesn't work. It is a part of her plan that men in the neighborhood comply with her ideas of proper male behavior no less than it is a part of his plan that women in it comply with his ideas of proper female behavior. The true reason we call his plan wicked and not hers is that we already know that rape is wrong; in other words we know that her aspiration for men and women to act like gentlefolk is good, whereas his aspiration for them to act like animals is bad. Neutrality is not our starting any more than our ending-point. The Pluralist only lets in by the back door what he has thrown out the front.

Fooling ourselves about our starting points might not be so bad if we always wound up where we ought to be, but that is not what happens in Pluralism either. My colleague thinks reasonable people of all persuasions will agree that since we do not know whether the fetus is a human being, we should let each woman decide for herself whether to have an abortion or not. There is the argument from ignorance again. But even if it were true that we do not know what babies are -- a point I do not concede -- why should we say that because the baby might not be human we may kill him? Why not say that because he might be, we should protect him? We do not say that because I might not hit anyone, I may swing my hatchet blindly in a crowded room; we say that because I might hit someone, I shouldn't. Besides, it is a little thin to claim certainty that humans have surpassing value, yet ignorance about whether our own young are human -- to flaunt our wisdom about the what of being human, yet deny having any about the who.

What we see then is that decision is never neutral, and Pluralism functions merely as a license to be arbitrary. While claiming to reconcile competing views without deciding which is true, it covertly supposes the truth of one of them but spares itself the trouble of demonstration. What this suggests is that the Classical way of affirming absolute values has more going for it than the Pluralists concede. Certainly it has more integrity. Maybe we should not take the surrounding Babel at face value; maybe we should go back to apologetics. If we are serious, we might even consider Christianity.

Very well, Christianity. But why original sin? Because the three great troubles of public life are all results of the Fall. Politics would have been easy in Eden, but that was a long time ago. One of our troubles is plain and practical: We do wrong. The second is intellectual: We not only misbehave but misthink, not only do wrong but call it right. The third, of course, is strategic, for the second affects our efforts to cope with the first. Our toils to rectify sin are themselves twisted by sin, our labors to shed light on iniquity themselves darkened by iniquity. No mind is unstained, no motive unmixed. We cannot fix ourselves. As well expect a surgeon to sew his severed hands back on.

There is one hope. But because one of the greatest and deepest temptations of politics is to identify it prematurely, allow me to do that which would otherwise, for the pain of it, be inexcusable -- to speak a bit longer of the malady, and of how we think about it.

Most political ideologies just deny it. In America, the most prevalent ignore it. There is the progressivism which thinks that if only the citizens would stand aside, government would fix everything. Then there is the libertarianism which thinks that if only the government would stand aside, the market would fix everything. On the one hand is the hubris of the experts, whose war against poverty multiplied poverty and whose tender care for the common man erected an Imperium of judges and bureaucrats. On the other hand is the cupidity of the amateurs, for in the marketplace our desires are aroused so assiduously and scratched so efficiently that we spend our lives and exhaust our fortunes just to find new places where we might itch.

The universities are dominated by ideologies of another kind: smarter in one way, but stupider in another. How are they smarter? They misidentify the deeper problem of original sin, but at least they are looking for a deeper problem. Marxists locate it in ancient class conflict. Feminists tra...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The Fallen City
• Chapter 2: The Revenge of Conscience
• Chapter 3: The Illusion of Moral Neutrality
• Chapter 4: Politics of Virtues, Government of Knaves
• Chapter 5: The Problem With Communitarianism
• Chapter 6: The Problem With Liberalism
• Chapter 7: The Problem With Conservatism
• Chapter 8: Why We Kill the Weak
• Chapter 9: The Fallen City (reprise and charge)
• Notes