In The Liberal Mind, I think Professor Minogue dismisses the query “What is the essence of Liberalism?” for reasons which are proper, but I’ll discuss it anyway because I think it to be one of those ultimately futile lines of inquiry which can lead us to better ways of understanding human nature, especially in its communal aspects, because of what we’ve learned — or should have learned — from modern empirical knowledge-gathering enterprises, especially physics and mathematics. We can start with Minogue’s warning about some approaches to understanding the modern views of human politics (nearly all of those being ‘liberal’ or other choices which are mostly far worse):
If we seek, rather pointlessly, for some essential liberal position, then we might find it in the belief that happiness and individual freedom are always in harmony. Just as liberals believe that the good of the people may always be identified with what the people want, so they also believe that we can have variety without suffering. [page 78]
Perhaps some who don’t consider themselves to be liberals also share this “belief that happiness and individual freedom are always in harmony.” And perhaps we can guess at one of the reasons many human beings speak well of freedom and do nothing to gain it or maintain it — they prefer to be happy. Happiness to most physical creatures is tied more closely to safety and comfort, to protection against suffering or early death and to a full stomach and a chance to relax and not have to work hard with brain or back. For example, nearly all the American Christians I know seem to think that God owes them a safe and prosperous life in return for not committing the worst sorts of sins and for praying and worshiping. I’ll speak no more of this difficult situation here, though I’d like to see my fellow Americans and others wake up and become aware of the terrible situation we’re in, not just created by failures of regulation or some glitches in banking or manufacturing. We’ve let much of the foundations of Western Civilization decay underneath us and we show little sign now of being capable of dealing with this mess.
The unwillingness of Americans, perhaps most modern human beings of the West, to face reality and to respond to it was a much discussed problem and historians and other analysts, from Tocqueville and Hawthorne through Nock and Ortega Y Gasset through Barzun and Kennedy, have seen the signs and tried to warn us. In recent years, we were too busy watching television and prior generations had excuses just as strong.
We must move on, understanding what we currently are — formless puddings rather than evil brews — and then moving on to better things. If you wish, you can think in terms of C.S. Lewis’ image of hollow-chested men. One sign of our decay is that we have absorbed some ideas from liberalism, mostly from the optimistic wing of liberalism and mostly ones which release us from the responsibility of taking care of our own selves and those in our families or other local communities. We believe we can have it all, freedom and happiness and we just assume one of the central powers, political or business or charitable, will be there to make sure we have it all.
But…
I’m going to head in a radically different direction, questioning whether we even understand the components of human nature and human community life well enough to have meaningful discussions based upon such aspects of human life as ‘freedom’ or ‘happiness’. My goal is not to produce another critique of political thought and behavior in the modern world, though I have to engage in those sorts of critiques at times. My goal is to provide a framework and language for discussing human moral communities of all sorts, including political communities. That might not be a goal to be achieved in a single lifetime nor by one man. In fact, this new understanding of Adam in what is truly a new phase of God’s story, our world or even the entirety of Creation, is a substantial part of what needs to be attained to build a foundation for a new civilization.
I’m in the process of writing my first list of assumptions for a run at providing for richer and more complex discussions of human social, moral, political, and economic structures and our paths of development as we respond to these structures and to other realms of being. For now, I’ll make public some of my ponderings about the nature of human moral development — key to the entire human organism in so far as he is a potential person, that is, an entity which is unified, coherent, and complete in the way of the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit.
I consider created being as, in one sense, a spectrum running from abstract truths to concrete things. That is: “Things are true,” as St. Thomas Aquinas claimed, and “Truths are thing-like,” as I’ve claimed. It’s also necessary to bear in mind that concrete being is shaped from more abstract forms of being grounded ultimately in truths God chose to manifest for this particular Creation. It’s unclear how we can talk about the different layers of created being, that is forms of being with different degrees of abstraction and concreteness.
In line with both Aquinas and modern brain-scientists, I consider mind to be not an entity but rather a set of relationships between the human organism and its environments, including itself in some recursive ways. This mind is shaped, at least in a healthy and robust form, by active responses to its environments, maybe the entire universe which I call this world when seen in light of God’s purposes, or even — miraculously, the entirety of Creation.
With that in the background, the idea behind my slowly ongoing efforts to develop these new ways of understanding human nature, in its individual and social aspects, is to borrow from the sophisticated analysis physicists and mathematicians have made of spacetime, matter-energy, fields, and so forth, abstract to an appropriate level where we meet up with the abstract forms of being which we draw upon in forming our minds, abstractions still present in the most mundane of physical things.
I think a good qualitative understanding of our human moral natures has to be built first on the recognition of the true developmental nature of an organism, goal-oriented development, intentional development. This is true not only of the human brain and our skills in moving through the world but also of our social and moral relationships. Obviously, there is a great, almost recursive, mess here with mind and human moral development and social relationships not so separable. Some extreme individualists, especially modern liberals of the left-wing or centrist or right-wing variety, will have problems with my way of speaking now that it’s becoming clear that I’m claiming human individuals aren’t some sort of free-standing metaphysically-defined entities but rather complex entities intertwined with their societies and physical environments and formed by active response to specific environments. As I’ve claimed before: Einstein didn’t have a paleolithic mind stuffed with the schematic knowledge of the 19th century but rather did he have a mind shaped to a more complexly considered knowledge of that 19th century. He was more of a German and a European than he himself might have admitted.
I’m writing about qualitative understandings at various levels of abstraction and concreteness. Here’s a very crude diagram to make my goals a little more explicit, especially to those who haven’t been following my work for the past few years or more:
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| Primordial Universe |
| (truths manifested by God) |
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| |
| |
-------------------- -----------------------
| (X) Abstractions | | Other Abstractions |
| Leading to | | |
| Complex Paths | | |
-------------------- -----------------------
| | |
| | |
---------------- ------------------ ----------------------
| (Y1) More | | (Z1) More | | Various |
| Concrete | | Concrete | | Concrete |
| Abstractions | | Abstractions | | Abstractions, some|
| of General | | of Moral | | Feeding into |
| Relativity | | Understanding | | Human Nature |
---------------- ------------------ ----------------------
| | | |
| | |------------ |
------------- -------------- ------------
| (Y2) Our | | (Z2) Human | | Various |
| Universe | | Nature | | Things |
------------- -------------- ------------
Something like that.
Physicists and mathematicians have given us an understanding of the abstractions at Node Y1. I think their work includes at least an implicit understanding of what might be at Node X. If we can clarify that understanding of Node X a bit, we can move to Node Z1 and then to Node Z2. The abstractions at Node Z1 won’t be mathematical in terms of quantification, so far as I can anticipate matters. But I suspect that mathematics, even including its quantitative fields, is grounded upon abstract forms of being which are more qualitative than quantitative. Relationships are primary and entities, even mathematical truths, come into existence because of a relationship. (Pending relationships cause the fuzziness of quantum mechanics rather than any absolute undertainty.)
The language is fuzzy and necessarily so. I’m trying to develop language for talking about more abstract realms of being and am forced to twist and re-use existing language to do so. I think I can do better as this project moves forward but I know there are others out there who will be able to do better, perhaps some reading this essay soon after I post it. In any case, I have a very preliminary list of assumptions about the properties of that realm of being in Node Z1 and will try to move all the way up to Node X.
I’ll end with a simple warning not to take the diagram itself literarally. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it so far as such charts of knowledge go, but my own view of knowledge would imply the situation is much more complex, recursive, interactive, iterative… Chose your own favorite buzzword from those which populate serious and popular works telling us about modern empirical knowledge. This essay itself could be considered to be somewhat recursive — I’ll now point back to the starting-point. I think liberalism, at least in its more classical form, is composed of efforts to answer questions raised by new empirical knowledge of human nature (Node Z1). However poorly formed some of the questions of liberal thinkers might be, as bad as some of their answers have proven to be, they were intelligent efforts fairly early in this era of great expansion in empirical knowledge. Most of the answers proposed by the other schools of modern thought were worse, for example, various schools of socialism and fascism. Conservative and traditional forms of thought couldn’t, on their own resources, provide direct answers, being so inclined toward protection of what was perceived as good in inherited knowledge and attitudes and ways of life as to be largely closed to new opportunities and inclined to retreat into various sorts of ghettos when facing those opportunities in the form of problems or outright threats.
What we need, in terms set by this essay, are thinkers who can move up to higher levels of abstraction to figure out our human natures and communities become more complex and richer in possibilities (even the most passive of individual human beings have natures which are more complex just because of our more complex communities). I’m suggesting that we can learn many tricks from modern physicists and mathematicians and might very well be able to borrow directly from what has been learned from the exploration of spacetime, matter and energy and fields, and even the most abstract regions of mathematics.
Slowly, so slowly as to be quite frustrating, I’m moving forward and have already written out a very tentative list of assumptions as to the structure of Node Z1 in the diagram above. It will likely take months, perhaps a year or more, to settle on a good list of assumptions and to do much with them. Don’t worry — I’ll be pestering my readers with preliminary versions.